why twitter will rot your brain

I don't normally write negative posts, but I have to vent a little at people's Twitter usage. Previously, I have always thought that technology is blameless, and it just amplifies human flaws. E.g., if you are a lazy gossiper, you are pretty much destined to become addicted to Facebook or MSN Messenger.

Twitter is markedly different however, for the simple reason:

Twitter is *only* really useful if you use it *very* frequently. Thus, responsible and disciplined use of Twitter in a work context is almost impossble.

The same is not true of any other social media stuff. Blogs have deep and interesting articles that can be found and read at any time that I choose. If I miss my friend who I haven't seen in a year, I can see pics of what they've been up to on Facebook. I can open MSN Messenger when it suits me, have a live conversation, then close the app.

However, Twitter's only function is shallow, asynchronous conversation.
It's the same as what kids have been doing for ages - leaving MSN group conversation windows open all day and just dropping in and out over the course of a day.

You know when you first started blogging, and you only really "got it" when people started linking to you and commenting on your stuff? The "Eureka" moment for Twitter comes when you start to have conversations/responses over short (sub 1 hour) timespans.


What is so bad about this then?

If your job honestly depends on really timely information, this is fine.

Examples - journalist, ambulance dispatcher, guy sailing a boat heading rapidly towards Tower Bridge. Maybe someone running a very time sensitive online PR campaign, but I have not seen any campaigns that would justify this.

If your job involves thinking at all, Twitter is simply just another huge distraction. Not just when you are using it, but it nags your brain from your subconscious whilst you are trying to concentrate deeply on something else. Enough has been written on this, and I quote from Neil (Only Dead Fish) paraphrasing Jon Steel's Perfect Pitch:

"our modern obsession with speed and ‘always on’ connectivity reduces our ability to concentrate on the task in hand. Even if our thoughts are not already interrupted, our minds are constantly ready to be, resulting in a loss of focus."

On top of this, there just isn't anything terribly good on Twitter. I can't hand-on-heart pretend it's a help at all to my job, despite all the brightest and best of the comms and tech indusry being on it.

Put it this way, look at Stephen Fry's Twitter. He is arguably the most funny, articulate and intelligent person on this planet, but his Twitter feed basically contains utterdrivel.

I also follow the Mashable guy with the scary super close up face photo. Mashable is a great blog and resource - but dripping it out as links over 24 hours simply does not make it any better for most people!

Solutions:
a) ditch Twitter
b) total Twitter discipline. Check/refresh Twitter only at certain scheduled times, e.g. on the hour.

Conclusion
Twitter is quite fun, but for most of us, it isn't useful on a day-to-day basis, and I strongly suspect that prolonged (and therefore necessarily frequent) usage erodes your basic ability to concentrate on tasks which require actual thinking.

In other words, I am the Daily Mail and I am calling cancer on this one.

transmedia giant lego man washed up on beach

There's a lot of talk about "transmedia" right now, basically meaning

a story which unfolds across lots of different media platforms, with different media contributing distinct bits of the story to make up the whole thing.

I think the plannersphere as a whole has been guilty of perverting and dumbing down the meaning of this, using it to refer almost exclusively to treasure hunts, ARGs (alternate reality games), mysteries or teaser campaigns.

Transmedia means more than simply having your audience dig around for info!

One example of something hailed as transmedia is Golden Jigsaw - this is just a website treasure hunt where you collect pieces of a picture. It's not transmedia storytelling, here's why:

1. There isn't a story.
The only story is "where's the next clue?". There isn't a plot to uncover - it's just a hunt.

2. It's not transmedia.
It only uses one mechanic - looking for clues on websites - so where are the multiple media platforms?



In the article Transmedia 101, by the term's founder Henry Jenkins he mentions the example of Pokemon.

A cartoon, a series of video games on every platform, a card game and a movie - all combining to create a rich universe full of life and stories that you can enter at any point - now that's transmedia.

There can be the odd mystery here and there, but the whole thing doesn't just rely on intrigue, like a lot of the teaser campaigns being called transmedia.

The purpose of my rant here isn't just to try to define things for the sake of it, but because transmedia comms planning is a powerful idea, and I hate to see it trivialised by being applied to every treasure hunt out there.

Also, mechanics like intrigue and mysteries are powerful ways to engage audiences, but there's no need to yell transmedia at them!


Children play near a giant smiling Lego man that was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort August 7, 2007. REUTERS/Marco de Swart

Anyway, a giant Lego man was washed up on a beach in Europe just yesterday. This kind of thing is what we need more of in transmedia campaigns, not just endless Internet hunts and teasers!