STUDY: ONLY 36% OF TWEETS ARE WORTH READING! Also read: What makes a great tweet? (Harvard Business Review)
Why Twitter Is Bigger Than You Think
“Here you can see that 11% of Americans 12+ (the gray slice) have not heard of Twitter, which means that 89% have. That is more than the percentage of Americans with online access (~86%), by the way, which gives you a pretty good yardstick for the ubiquity of Twitter.”
Artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall want to broadcast your tweets to an alien planet. In their own words:
Simply add #tweetsinspace to your texts […] Our soon-to-be alien friends will receive unmediated thoughts and responses about politics, philosophy, pop culture, dinner, dancing cats and everything in between. By engaging the millions of voices in the Twitterverse and dispatching them into the larger Universe, Tweets in Space activates a potent conversation about communication and life that traverses beyond our borders or understanding. It is not just a public performance; it performs a public.
#tweetsinspace a live performance event expected to take place this fall, will broadcast Twitter messages to GJ667Cc - a planet 22 light-years away that scientists say may support life. Just choose to overlook these discussions on SETI, you can see your tweets, retweeted by aliens.
Twitter Notes. Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on clayboard. 2012. Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery.
Sharing from Instagram to Twitter is now double what it was two months ago, and 20x what it was a year ago.
(via Royal Pingdom)
By the time network news broke into programming 21 minutes after Urbahn’s initial tweet, 80% of tweets discussing bin Laden’s death had been written as fact or in certain terms, according to the study.
“We believe Twitter was so quick to trust the rumors because of who sent the first few tweets… They came from reputable sources. It’s unlikely that a CBS News producer or a New York Times reporter would spread rumors of something so important and risk jeopardizing their reputation. Twitter saw their credentials and quickly believed the news was true.”
After the initial reports and confirmations, however, something interesting happened: Celebrities became the key connectors in spreading news about bin Laden’s death. Within a half-hour of the first television reports, a group of 100 “elite users,” including comedian Steve Martin and reality stars Kim Kardashian and Paul “DJ Pauly D” DelVecchio of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” had surpassed the traditional media’s reach in spreading the news by Twitter.
Brains wired up by Twitter feeds!
In Praise of Ignorance: Why It’s OK to Tweet, ‘Who Is Dick Clark?’
It’s totally legitimate that younger people wouldn’t know who Dick Clark is. It’s totally legitimate, even, that older people wouldn’t know who Dick Clark is: “American Bandstand” is not the most contemporary of shows, and most of us are doing other things on December 31 than watching “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.” What’s interesting, though, is what the tweeters above — and their thousands of fellow “Who’s Dick Clark?” queriers — did with their ignorance. Rather than do a Google search for “Dick Clark,” rather than look him up on Wikipedia, rather than avail themselves of the approximately 5,000 other web-based mechanisms that exist solely to rectify the world’s ignorance, these people asked their followers on Twitter.
For some of them, the question might have been simply ironic — or, more specifically, an ironic declaration of generational/sociological affiliation. (Who’s Justin Bieber?) For many, though, the question seemed like an honest one: “Guys, I don’t know this person everyone’s talking about. Help me out.” It wasn’t just that the “Who’s Dick Clark” crowd were embracing their ignorance; it was that, through Twitter, they were trying to rectify it.
But they were also publicizing it. Rather than taking the relatively introverted route toward satisfying their curiosity — Google, Bing, Wikipedia, platforms that treat a question as a silent transaction between mind and machine — the “Who’s Dick Clark?” Twitterers asked their question openly and publicly. They chose to broadcast their ignorance.
And that choice is a new thing. In the past, ignorance has been, you know, something to be ashamed of. To call someone “ignorant” has been, generally, to insult that someone; and it’s been an insult specifically because ignorance is an accusation that assaults not just a person’s knowledge, but a person’s intelligence. It’s no coincidence that, etymologically, “ignorant” is connected with “uncouth.” We have construed ignorance as a matter of personal failing.
Also relevant to anybody asking, “Who is Levon Helm?” (If those people exist.)
Ignorance is no longer stupidity. Stupidity is when you don’t want to use today’s collaborative technologies to broadcast your ignorance to rectify it. But when you want to satisfy your curiosity you find yourself ”taking the relatively introverted route — Google, Bing, Wikipedia, platforms that treat a question as a silent transaction between mind and machine”; that’s stupidity.
Undeniably, social media has changed the way we acquire knowledge. And, Twitter followers and Facebook friends are increasingly becoming people’s trusted sources of information, even more than search engines.
Twitter Bird Sketch - Made with SketchBook Pro on iPad. via Flickr.com
(via thenextweb)
