Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Rob Horning pointed out how Twitter has changed the way he reads and analyzes articles on the Net, or rather how he doesn’t do those things anymore: “Now, when I hit upon an article that starts me thinking, I excerpt a sentence of it on Twitter and start firing off aphoristic tweets….At worst, tweeting pre-empts my doing any further thinking, since I am satisfied with merely charting the response.” Next look at Jennifer Guevin’s complaint about how “snap judgments at warp speed are ruining the Internet” . She cites the following example: “A dude at a tech conference tweets a picture of a woman's feet in stilettos, and judges her to be brainless based on the fact that she is wearing said footwear. Predictably, outrage ensues.” Neither side of the “rage war” that followed on Twitter, Guevin says, stops to factor in that nobody can really convey their point, let alone subtleties, in 140 characters. Is it not possible, asks Guevin, that the guy who tweeted was an: “equal...

A few days back, Vatican cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi called Jesus Christ the first user of Twitter . Huh? Ravasi says Christ: “used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like ‘Love one another’”. Embracing the Internet seems to be the signature of Pope Francis. This reminded me of Bruce Handy’s analysis as to how much wisdom can be squeezed into the 140 character limit that Twitter enforces. His answer? It was enough for not only Jesus but also Descartes, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Martin Luther King! A few samples from Handy’s list : I think, therefore I am. (24) Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (35) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. (47) What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (83) I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (113) But are these just soundbites? Surely you lose...

I read this old article on Twitter by Nicholas Carr only recently (he wrote it when Twitter was just starting to catch on) but it was still fun to read. I loved his description what Twitter does: “Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.” The difference from the telegraph is illuminating: “The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it!” Nothing seems to have changed between now and then it comes to what people tweet: “And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives.” Or to put it more colourfully: “Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.” Reduced to tweet size, that would be: “Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?” And once Twitter got critical mass, it b...

In case you don’t know what hashtags (symbol: #) are used for on Twitter, read this paragraph; but if you know what they are, move on to the next paragraph. Hashtags were created by Chris Messina in 2007 as a way to “tag” a tweet as being about a particular topic or event. Tagging this way then makes search easy. It is left to users to use the hashtag appropriately because indiscriminate usage would just garble everything up. An example of hashtags are used is: “The growth of #socialmedia has been exponential”. Ok, so now onto the topic of this blog. When we talk about the old meeting the new, I don’t think anyone had in mind the Vatican combining indulgences (an indulgence is what the Church sold granted to Catholics to reduce the time they spent in purgatory; or in Monopoly lingo, a Get Out Of Hell Free card) with Twitter. So how does it work? The Vatican announced that one of the ways to get an indulgence now includes following the Pope on Twitter! Imagine that: this is ...