Too Good to Be True

4 Feb 2010

by Rebecca Rolfes

Recent studies show that use of Twitter is slowing.  For those of us who never really got Twitter, who, in fact, dislike Twitter, this is wonderful news.

• New Twitter enrollments are about 20% below July 2009 peak rate.
• Many Twitter accounts are inactive. About 25% have no followers and about 40% have never sent a single Tweet.
• Most Twitter users—about 80%—have tweeted fewer than 10 times.

Even the founders have moved on. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, announced Square, a mobile-payments company, in December.

However, as the founders of Twitter have always said, the users will determine the uses. If the inanity of a lot of Tweets drives business users away, so be it. If the ability to communicate in real time with legislators opens a new door of digital public affairs, so be it. If the traffic-driving potential attracts consumer brands and publishers, so be it. They put the tool (toy?) in our hands; now let’s see what we do with it.

Of course, anytime Bill Gates pays attention to a technology, the rest of us can be sure that there’s something there, something that the rest of us may be missing.

Microblogging, like text messaging, is fast and cheap. A lot of what’s out there will be noise but, again like text messaging, it’s permission based. If you’re judicious in whom you follow and the Twitter tools you use to communicate and allow others to communicate with you, it’s got its uses.

No, I do not want to read about balloon boy. If I had time to do that, I’d be home on the couch watching Wolf Blitzer make a fool of himself.  But I do want to know what smart people whom I’ve selected have seen that I missed. For the right occasion, I want the immediacy of “you are there” type reporting.

Twitter drives me crazy but it does have its uses.

Posted in AGP Feature, Social Media | No Comments »

Creativity vs. Inanity–The Face Off

5 Aug 2009

by Rebecca Rolfes

I admit it. I am a reluctant social networker. I almost headlined this post, “Confessions of a Reluctant Social Networker” but there’s something bigger than reluctance going on here.

I am a writer. My first work was published when I was 13. I have spent my entire adult life preferring to sit alone in a quiet room, to think and to write. Don’t get me wrong: I can have a good time too. I have tickets to Lollapallooza.  I wandered around Argentina on a bus for a month. I have this thing for old blues bars with pool tables and only one beer on tap. There’s nothing better than a good giggle at a long table with great friends and lots of wine.

But the day is dedicated to work, work in silence, work alone. I must be good at it. I’ve made a living at it for 40 years.

So maybe I’m just old. But when my 83-year-old mother is on Facebook, I think there’s more going on than age.

I listen to Clay Shirky about “the greatest explosion in personal expression of all time,” and I want to be part of it. If moveable type changed everything after and this is going to change everything to that extent from here on, I want to be there. You would think that someone who loves to write would gravitate to the new media that make it so easy to do, that make the connection between writer and reader so direct.

The problem is that I know how hard it is to write and to write well. It can’t be done all day every day. There is writing and there is typing; there is communication and there is idle chatter.

Hemingway shot for three pages a day, three good, publishable pages. That took most of the day because a lot of what he wrote wasn’t good enough. Submitting your work to a group of editors (three is a publishing industry minimum) gives you a healthy lesson in self-editing. The words that tumble out easily are rarely the pearls we think they are. Even after all these years, I need an editor. Everyone does.

So Hemingway, sitting on his cigar-maker’s chair because it was uncomfortable and so kept him alert, all alone, no iPod, no phone, no Starbuck’s, wrote, self-edited, re-wrote, deleted, discarded and slowly, painfully slowly came up with some of the greatest prose ever written. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, he said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life….For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” He changed the novel forever. Think about that for a minute. That’s something worth doing, that’s something that awes writers like me.

Today, of course, we don’t do that. We just publish it, hit the “publish” button on Word Press and off it goes, into the ether with the rest of the un-edited, sloppily crafted, spur of the moment, top of the head, mental drool that is out there. Facing eternity? Not even close.

Most people on Twitter are not creative, they just pass along someone else’s creative product. Lance Armstrong’s pictures of the bikes that artists designed for him. Me quoting you, quoting someone else. The best thing on Twitter is probably Shaquille O’Neal’s Your Mama jokes.  The people I find saying interesting things—Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson , John Zogby —aren’t on Twitter. There are lots of people, thousands of people talking about them on Twitter but they themselves are off being creative somewhere else. Perhaps sitting alone in a quiet room on a cigar maker’s chair.

We are in the process of reinventing media, a term that Anderson says “stands in our way, like a horseless carriage.” But we will not reinvent creativity by substituting inanity. Be interesting, not glib. Be creative, not slap dash. Work hard. Don’t publish everything you write. Don’t publish every minute of your life. Don’t talk about your work, just publish the end product and let the reader judge whether it’s any good.

Posted in AGP Feature, Social Media | 4 Comments »