What technology tells us about society

Twitter has become an excellent way to quickly scan headlines. It's terrible at just about everything else. It's hard to have a coherent discussion in 140-character soundbites, and even harder when the architecture of Twitter is set to "broadcast" rather than "discourse." But maybe, just maybe, Twitter's not to blame. We are.

After all, Twitter is simply a creation of our society, and reflects our priorities.

Not all of society, of course. After all, as The New York Times reported, teenagers, usually technology's early adopters, hardly use Twitter at all, with only 11 percent of people aged 11 to 17 using the service. They are, however, heavily into Facebook, preferring to share with friends rather than talk at strangers.

A generational thing?

Perhaps. But I think the technology we build and use says a lot about society.

Competition from Bing, Ask, and other search engines is just one click away and likely equally good for Google users, yet we stick with Google. Why? Because it's fast, free, and has never disdained its users with a cluttered interface. Many of us were with Google early on and continue to reward its early respect for its customers. We're a loyal people that likes a crowd.

This phenomenon is hinted at in personal computers, too. While I'm part of a rising group of people who prefers the Mac to Microsoft Windows, I'm also in a distinct minority, according to data from Net Applications. The reality is that most people look at their computer the way they do toilet cleaner: necessary to get a job done but not anything to get worked up about.

Contrast this to personal entertainment devices or phones like the iPhone/iPod. Here, Apple trounces Microsoft's Soviet offerings and Dell, a leader in enterprise computing hardware, has to go all the way to China to even register a design win. Apparently, we want to differentiate in our communications and our entertainment (iPhone/iPod), but not our work (computers).

Back to business. As well as open source is doing in enterprise IT, the reality is that CIOs and CTOs don't get too worked up about freedom and such. There's a very good reason that IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft dominate enterprise software, and "choice" is not it. These vendors simplify purchasing decisions by providing limited, but still good, choices.

Business, in other words, is business, not religion. OpenOffice is nearly as good as Microsoft Office in most ways, and better in a few. But it still captures anemic market share because it's simply not worth the bother for most enterprises or consumers. (Firefox, on the other hand, is, and continues to gain market share because we value the increased options its add-on library brings us.)

Open source is absolutely getting adopted, but only where it accomplishes tangible goals like cost reduction and increased productivity. As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.

Well, except for when we're furiously friending on Facebook during work hours, costing employers as much as 1.5 percent of productivity. You see, we're not all work and no play.

Which, incidentally, suggests that there just might be something to attempts by IBM and others to marry social software with enterprise IT. Our work lives are increasingly blended with our personal lives. They're just about the same thing.

All of which must increasingly be done in real time, as Twitter, instant messaging, SMS/texting, and other immediate or near-immediate technologies suggest. Even e-mail, which used to be considered "fast" communication, has moved to mobile devices so that it's omnipresent and, hence, that much quicker.

All of which raises the question, "Why are you still reading this post?" After all, you've spent 3,000 characters here in which time you could have already plowed through 21 tweets. Think of all the headlines you could have read. :-)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[septa44]

With regards to Twitter, I agree. I don't understand how people can "blame" Twitter when it is simply a medium that was created for a specific purpose. It's how we use technology, not the technology itself, that can be either done positively or negatively. At some point, Twitter and Facebook will disappear; the questions of how we use technology for our purposes will remain.

Adam
http://www.twitterbacklash.com

[jspaleta]

You know what twitter is great for...broadcasting unverifiable rumors hoping that someone else will pick up on it and write an article..which you can than point to as being an interesting topic of discussion to legitimize writing your own article. It's a usage you've mastered, Matt.

[jrepenning]

Socializing instead of working is as old as the coffee pot--probably as old as those paintings in caves at Lascaux ;-) If you only look at the social uses, you're likely only to find social uses. But text conversation tools also have well-established value in doing the work. Some examples:

- Most of the open-source projects I've been involved in got a substantial amount of their work done in IRC (a sort of proto-Twitter)

- Globally distributed agile processes often use texting tools for the meetings that, in pure-quill Agile, involve everyone in the same room (often called the "daily stand-up," but I guess on the internet, no one can tell if you're standing ;-)

The oft-discussed "long tail" of dead Twitter accounts surely represents people who didn't find it useful for whatever they expected to use it for, but we should also look at the hard core of people who are finding it useful. There seems to me to be some serious business going on in Twitter, of several sorts:

- A sort of "alert" or "headline" function, drawing attention to blogs (like, seems like, *everyone*), news (e.g. @JesseNewhart), and other lengthier postings and events (Tim O'Reilly @timoreilly)

- "Passing notes in (conference) classes" -- and out of the class, to those who couldn't attend

- Community-forming of specialized micro-communities (iPhone developers are a huge example, or #eclipse-plugins)

- Community organizing of a more or less political nature, from Al Gore (@algore) to Brenda Wallace (@br3nda)

[Rozzma]

I was reading this post hoping you were going to say something really insightful - other than the obvious, insightful comment you made to make me read the post to begin with - and got to the end and was asking myself why I was still reading...

Maybe I should have just read the last line and saved myself the time!

But seriously, I think quite a lot can be said about differences between Facebook and Twitter users. In the early days I shunned twitter in preference for Facebook, however, now for business, Twitter is invaluable, whereas Facebook is just where I go to update my friends & associates on what I am doing and thinking. Interestingly, I think that in itself speaks volumes about our modern society: 'friends' today are more like associates, and most of the time we are too lazy to even write an email to our really close friends (if we have any), let alone pick up the phone.

And perhaps that is the vicious circle created by technology: friends don't become really close friends anymore because most of the communication we have with them is in brief 140-420 character 'updates' where we never actually have the time or exchange to really get to know them?!

But, having said, I interact with some of my closest friends via Facebook, in addition to catching up in person, which I think further enhances our friendship because we can share 'moments' even though they are not there...

[wiz21]

> As a society, we don't seem to want to waste hours of the work
> day fighting ideological battles. We just want to get work done.

Yeah, we're all sheeps, and so are you... Tss Matt, I read better things from you :-) Of course the easier way is the better way, but I wouldn't be so sure as the fact that we don't fight ideological battles. The opensource/GPL battle is sure not very popular (or useful to get the work done) but I'm convinced that choosing DB2 vs Oracle; Eclipse/NetBeans; Java/C, etc. is most often more ideological than we want to admit it. It's ideological because it's uninformed.