More thoughts about Twitter

Yesterday (November 22), there was a two-page article in the Globe and Mail about Twitter. The company's new goal is to become a major player in the world of "big data". As the article says, "every Twitter user is a data geyser". There's not a word about educational use of the platform--or any of the other supposed social benefits of Twitter (the apocryphal "role" it has supposedly played in the "Arab Spring" and so on). Twitter sees users as nothing more or less than data points/streams to be commodified.

Twitter has always thought of itself--and tried to function--as a "global water cooler"; the place where you talk about your favorite TV show, sports team, and so on. It still seems to function as such, but Twitter apparently faces a growing divergence between veteran, "hard-core" users and their more recent, casual counterparts. Such a bifurcation doesn't bode well for Twitter as a "conversational" medium. It suggests that it may well become more of broadcast/consumption platform, in which most users are passive consumers of content produced by a small minority of producers, with Twitter as the classic middleman or "entrepreneur" (from the French for "enterprise", but more specifically "entre" (between) + "preneur" (getter)--the classic bourgeois middleman inserting himself between producer and consumer), making money by selling users (and their data) to advertisers.

Twitter now has a clearly defined business model, which is unmistakably moving away from individual users and toward advertisers and developers. This would suggest that senior leadership at Twitter cares not a single iota about the social and interpersonal aspects of the medium. Senior leadership isn't interested in how people use Twitter. They make absolutely no mention of the supposed human dimension of the medium--be it social, political, educational, or anything else. They're not interested in the functionality of the platform. All they're interested in is mining and selling data.

To me, this suggests that Twitter is anything but socially conscious. In fact, it is quite the contrary--yet another threat to personal privacy--if such a notion even exists or matters any more. Every time anyone uses Twitter--no matter what they may THINK they're using it for, they are simply becoming a more and more accurately refined data point/stream, to be packaged and sold.