Twitter Backlash Backlash

I’m hardly a Twitter evangelist. I only signed up a couple of months ago and don’t check it/post to it religiously, but I’ve become attached to it enough to get a little bit tired of the recent wave of Twitter backlash, most of which seems to have missed the point by a mile.

The main criticism that seems to get leveled at Twitter is that it is purely used to ramble about irrelevant bullshit, like what you had for lunch. Now here’s the secret for all you non-Twitter users: if someone only tweets about boring nonsense that you don’t want to read you don’t follow that person. Why would you? Instead you go an find people who consistently post interesting stuff that you do want to read and you follow them instead. The bottom line is that if a person’s Tweets bore you it is the fault of the boring person, not Twitter. Twitter is a communications medium, just like email or the telephone. Would you say ‘Telephones are stupid, all the people who call me are boring’? No, you’d say the people are boring  and stupid (and you’d change your telephone number)!

Twitter is often assaulted with dumb irrelevant statistics such as Twitter Tweets are 40% Babble(BBC News Website). Someone in the US has done a survey and classified 40% of Tweets as ‘babble’. Skipping over the fact that ‘babble’ is a really subjective term (and the question of who pays for these pointless surveys anyway?), how is this Twitter’s fault? See above, if someones tweets are 40%  ’babble’ then you make an educated decision about whether the other 60% are worth hanging around for and then whether you decide to keep following them is entirely up to you, not Twitter.

Another randon statistic that has been used to somehow criticise Twitter goes along the line of “95% of all Tweets posted by 5% of Twitter users!”. Erm, so what? Is the fact that some people Tweet more often than others somehow a problem? Some people talk on the phone more than others but you don’t see headlines reading “95% of phone minutes used by 5% of phone owners!”. 99% of books are written by 1% of people with the ability to write, but that doesn’t mean you should stop reading. Many people (me included) signed up for a Twitter account purely so they could follow other people. You can get lots out of Twitter without writing a thing.

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