Twitter Backlash Grows in Santa Cruz

By Tom Dunlap

A writer for the Good Times weekly here in Santa Cruz, California, has penned an impassioned Twitter hater piece, "Twitter Sucks!"

The paper's Alexander Zaitchik is fired up, writing the following:

What was once an easily avoided subculture of needy and annoying online souls is now a growing part of the social and media landscapes, with tentacles reaching into the operations of major corporations, newspapers, networks, and political campaigns. Suddenly, our skies are dark with brightly colored cartoon birds.

... There is evolutionary logic to the Twitter surge.

The progression has been steady, from blogs to RSS feeds to Facebook. But Twitter brings us within sight of an apotheosis of those aspects of American culture that have become all too familiar in recent years: look-at-me adolescent neediness, constant-contact media addiction, bird-like attention-span compression, and vapidity to the point of depravity. When 140 characters is the ascendant standard size for communication and debate, what comes next? Seventy characters? Twenty? The disappearance of words altogether, replaced by smiley-face and cranky-crab emoticons?

Here's what I tell people like Mr. Zaitchik (whom I thank for a well-written, if misguided, piece.) I don't give a tinker's damn about Tweets from Oprah, Ashton Kutcher, Brooke Burke (OK, maybe I would check those, actually), or any other "star."

I don't care that Mary Jo PR Rep has gone out for coffee. I agree that there are too many of those. I'm not a huge fan of the cutesy Twitter language that me and my Tweet-heart use. I also don't think Twitter has transcendental properties. "It's about the triumph of the human spirit," Twitter CEO "Biz" Stone told New York Magazine recently.

But as a working journalist, Twitter rocks, if you know how to tweak it.  Here's how I use it: I'm the managing editor of the newly redesigned SemanticWeb.com. I need to know what the semweb experts are reading, and who's writing what. Those experts are all over map, with many in Europe. On the Semantic Web Twitter Group, these experts alert me to dozens of stories, blogs, columns, upcoming conferences, video clips, etc. Twitter also helps drive a fair amount of traffic to the brilliant content on our WebMediaBrands web sites. (Jupitermedia was recently renamed WebMediaBrands.)

Twitter is a fantastic resource. So whine all you want, Zaitchik.