Twitter and Facebook: the end of the world as we know it -- Yay!

Neil James from the Plain English Foundation has an excellent article in the Sydney Morning Herald this week on the e-revolution and why Facebook and Twitter and instant messaging (SMS etc) doesn't necessarily spell disaster for reading and writing and the sogginess or otherwise of our brains.

Indeed, according to research cited by James, one study of 15-20 year old texters found that they were actually more literate and adaptive than their non-texting peers.

Facebook and Twitter can be banal, or they can be delightful, poetic, witty, concise, and engaging - capturing tiny moments in our lives and holding them up to the gaze of our peers.

Social Media is also a brilliant networking technology, enabling information to be speedily shared among groups of people, and then critiqued and discussed.

By the way, twitter isn't just about posting what you had for breakfast or what the sky looks like as you walk down the street, as the cliche versions suggest.

One of the most powerful uses of Twitter is to tweet out the url of an article or piece of information or blog post that you find interesting, with a pithy comment full of keywords to get it to your target group. Through the mechanism of retweeting, you have a publishing mechanism that bypasses the gatekeepers and hurdles of traditional publishing.

As James suggests:

Anyone with a mobile phone and a signal can now post real-time critique, share events and reach a global audience. Once these revolutionary spaces are open, they are very hard for governments to contain and control.

If a defining feature of democracy is the ability of citizens to participate in open debate, then the new media will inevitably strengthen and diversify our public conversations rather than dumb them down.

 Now... I have to confess that I am an absolute Twitter newbie. In fact when I work out how to tweet out the link to this post, that will be my third ever tweet.  For me, Twitter is still a strange mysterious world.. But as with any social technology, I figure it is what you make of it. And you get out of it according to what you put in.

As with any part of the internet, there is the shallow end, and there is the deep end: dive in, splash around, and enjoy.

[pic watercolour ACEO by Jeri]

[And of course if you like this post or Neil James's article - please do share it with your FB friends or on Twitter etc. And comments are the lifeblood of any blog - so share your thoughts!]


Also: you can catch Neil James on a free panel on Interrogating Twitter this Thursday afternoon, 20th May 2010 at the Sydney Writers Festival.  See you there.