Via the Style section of the NYT, a great look at how tech works/doesn't in the real world. In this case, Michelle Slatalla goes gaga for Twitter, which is perilously close to being old hat/main stream among early adopters, and discovers....it's not quite ready. Some lovely quotes:
I thought it would have been a cinch to get my wired family twittering like parakeets. After all, my daughters are “supercommunicators,” according to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, because every day they interact with friends through multiple channels of communication — including cellphones, text messages, instant messages, e-mail and face-to-face conversations.
and:
By now I was desperate. I described the situation to Walter J. Carl, an assistant professor of communications studies at Northeastern University, who said he wasn’t surprised.
“You want to use these tools to keep up on others, in a good way, of course, and to let them keep up on you,” said Professor Carl, whose research focuses on social media. “But their perception is it’s surveillance.” One of the main reasons people embrace social media — Facebook, for instance — is to create identities for themselves and control other people’s perceptions of them.
“Maybe Twitter isn’t the right tool for that job,” he said. “The people who I see using it are an older demographic, people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”
Boy, talk about talking to ourselves. Maybe we're still in the early adopter stages for microblogging. Or just maybe, all of us master communicators will get tired of talking to ourselves and start talking to the broader world.