Looking4food
—the first public tweet
Make no mistake: there is a Tao to Twitter. There is a majestic random synergy that holds the potential to impact your life daily — if you know what you’re doing.
—from Mark Schaefer’s The Tao of Twitter
The communications platform Twitter celebrates its tenth anniversary on July 15, the day in 2006 when it was publicly and prematurely launched. At a Silicon Valley party convened in honor of all the start-up companies going out of business, one of Twitter’s co-founders drunkenly and without authorization began to demo the product to any dot-commer who would listen. The tweeter of “Looking4food” was also a tech blogger looking for a scoop; the next morning he and others posted about “a new mobile social networking application written by Noah Glass (and team).” By the end of the month, says Nick Bilton in Hatching Twitter, Glass was on the outside looking in, his fed-up “(and team)” having terminated his position with the nascent company:
Noah spent the next few days riding his bike around San Francisco . . . He cycled along the Embarcadero, watching the boats as they bobbed in the bay. He wrote in his journal as he lay in Dolores Park, the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark playing in the background. And he sat along the edge of the world as people played with massive kites in the wind. “Watching colorful parachutes trace the shape of infinity as they fall to earth,” he tweeted.
Bilton’s bestseller offers its personalized “True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” as a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs (and as enough raw material for an entire season of the Silicon Valley television series). But with an average of 500 million tweets now being sent each day, Twitter has become Valley legend and an essential tool for entrepreneurs hoping to replicate its success.
Acknowledging that the tweet-scape is in constant flux, Michael Schaefer’s The Tao of Twitter can only promise those hopeful of navigating it “a success formula of sorts.” But the original text from which Schaefer borrows his metaphor counsels the same: “The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way; the names that can be named are not unvarying names,” reads the opening sentence of the Tao Te Ching.
To parachute a metaphorical framework from a two-millennia-old Chinese text offering very different enlightenment — “Truly, only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences” — into a handbook about “Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time” suggests misappropriation. But social media itself is an ancient concept, says Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years. All historical eras before the rise of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century forms of mass communication (newspapers, radio, television) had some types of social media — scrolls, posters, pamphlets, coffeehouses, and the like. Modern mass media, Standage argues, should be viewed not as the natural order of things but an exception: “After this brief interlude — what might be called a mass media parenthesis — media is now returning to something similar to its preindustrial form.”
And returning to some ancient debates, says Standage — such as the one about how Twitter et al. are coarsening public discourse. Standage notes that Erasmus, in the early sixteenth century, complained of printers who “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.” Standage notes also Milton’s countering arguments in Areopagitica (1611), which lobbied “For the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing.” Time may tell otherwise, concludes Standage, but for now we must side with Milton and “Looking4food”:
One man’s coarsening of discourse is another man’s democratization of publishing. The genie is out of the bottle. Let truth and falsehood grapple.
Photo credit: Maddyhargrave via Wikimedia Commons.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29t0Y1y
Sig Nordal 