When web logs(or blogs) were first introduced, like a decade or half a decade ago?, they sat to serve a purpose. They were the voice of the common man whose voice is otherwise unheard of outside his teeny-tiny real world social network. (Wait, Did I just glorify the virtual online social networks? :-| ). It made him(or her) happy when his(or her) voice(or post) is heard(or read) and reacted by an unknown person thousand of kilometers away from there. It empowered him(?), elevated him(?) and most of all gave him a freedom of speech he never dreamed of. He voiced against the evil happenings around him, he expressed concerns for the less taken care of and he joined the virtual celebrations of pride and joy.
Life was good until 1 day came when people have become tweeple, blogosphere became twitosphere and a 4 para post came down to as little as a 3 sentence tweet. Microblogging. Everything is micro in it. Long urls became tiny urls, each tweet is subject to a meagre 140 characters victimizing poor vowels, most of the time they are squeezed out of the words to make the words look tiny and the website is a sad looking page of dullness. Sheer reduction, does it imply it is curbing/restricting the freedom blogs gave/give us? Not really. Rather it took conversations to the next level. How often do you get to speak to a celebrity(from a powerful politician(from Obama to Kevin Rudd to Shashi Tharoor) to a budding artist) directly? And the best of all is he/she replies you back. Intellectual tweets, informational tweets, impact-ual tweets and sometimes ignorable tweets. They changed the face and meaning of the word blog forever, which makes me, a blogger, sad. The cute looking blue sparrow is now everywhere in the world, tiny and powerful. On every social network, on every blog and every popular website hosting its own tiny url ready to be tweeted. The world as we see it is Twitterized!
Errr...
Are we living in a box? :-|
3 comments:
We are definitely moving towards living in a box :).. The world is really "shrinking" from phones to pods to cars to comps to food to human sizes to rooms to thoughts to emotions to relations and to blogs!!!.. Not sure am very happy about it but definitely astonished :).. This post will not qualify for a tweet though :?
finally we all realize its only a few that we can ever be in touch with at any point in time, our desire to be in touch with many made us jump into this virtual social networking worlds and now we are slowing adjusting our expectations and thus having more fun with it. at least that's my take :).
I am really huge fan of Twitter, let me say that first.
When i first saw Orkut, which connected me to school friends blah blah, it was all exciting. Then the show off part started, by uploading pics, searching good looking girls etc etc. Lastly it was communities that kept me going, specially our school gang kept me hooked for a while. Then it died and it just died.
It was time for Facebook, same approach but for a international circle. It never took off for me at all.
Then came Twitter, first day. I didn't even understand the interface properly, couldn't see any purpose. But then on it has solved all of my browsing problems once and for all. I call it Information on Demand. I have the powers to chose what i want :).
I want to read about a certain topic, search for a prominent personality in that area, one who makes sense to me. FOLLOW him and i will get all i need.
I have to stop now, i can go on and on abt twitter.
I just dont agree with one point though, blog's make more sense to me now then ever. It has found its right place, not everything can be blogged and not everything can be tweeted. They both can co-exist.
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