Why I do not love Twitter

I don’t love Twit­ter. There, I’ve said it. Why?

First, because it con­tributes to a del­uge of infor­ma­tion that is so preva­lent in our soci­ety. Newsweek mag­a­zine recent­ly pub­lished an inter­est­ing arti­cle about how many of us are suf­fer­ing from “infor­ma­tion fatigue.” As a soci­ety, many of us are exposed to more and more infor­ma­tion. Social media, e‑mails, adver­tise­ments, junk mail, tele­vi­sion, radio, and news­pa­per and mag­a­zines offer us an unpar­al­leled amount of news and enter­tain­ment. But all these choic­es can lead to “infobe­si­ty” (see my relat­ed blog post). Most of us think that more choice is a good thing but when peo­ple are faced with too many choic­es they make no decision.

Here’s one exam­ple cit­ed in Newsweek. “In a 2004 study, Sheena Iyen­gar of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty and col­leagues found that the more infor­ma­tion peo­ple con­front­ed about a 401(k) plan, the more par­tic­i­pa­tion fell: from 75 per­cent to 70 per­cent as the num­ber of choic­es rose from two to 11, and to 61 per­cent when there were 59 options. Peo­ple felt over­whelmed and opt­ed out.”

Those peo­ple who sol­diered on and attempt­ed to make a deci­sion often make poor­er choic­es. Researchers found that peo­ple exposed to too much infor­ma­tion “reach cog­ni­tive and infor­ma­tion overload…They start mak­ing stu­pid mis­takes and bad choic­es because the brain region respon­si­ble for smart deci­sion mak­ing has essen­tial­ly left the premises.”

Sec­ond, the stream of Tweets is relent­less. Accord­ing to the Newsweek arti­cle, researchers also found that “recent infor­ma­tion” ham­pers our abil­i­ty to make good deci­sions. “We pay a lot of atten­tion to the most recent infor­ma­tion, dis­count­ing what came earlier…We’re fooled by imme­di­a­cy and quan­ti­ty and think it’s qual­i­ty,” says Eric Kessler, a man­age­ment expert at Pace University’s Lubin School of Busi­ness. “What starts dri­ving deci­sions is the urgent rather than the important.”

Third, I don‘t love Twit­ter because most of the posts are, well, bor­ing. I don‘t care about what peo­ple had for lunch.

Fourth, lack of time. I don‘t have a lot of free time after work­ing full time, par­ent­ing, attempt­ing to exer­cise a few times a week, and keep­ing up with friends and fam­i­ly. I hard­ly watch any tele­vi­sion. So I don‘t under­stand how peo­ple have time to fol­low more than 700 indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter. I used to think Twit­ter was the social media plat­form for teenagers. But accord­ing to a sta­tis­tic from last year, more than 45 per­cent of Twit­ters users are 18 to 34 years old and 24 per­cent are 35 to 49 years old (website-monitoring.com from May 2010).

To sum­ma­rize, I think Twit­ter has val­ue when it‘s used in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions (check out the recent blog post I wrote about inte­grat­ing Twit­ter with tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion). But in gen­er­al, it con­tributes both to the del­uge of infor­ma­tion (most of it not very inter­est­ing or use­ful) and to the con­tin­u­ous real-time onslaught of infor­ma­tion that is con­sid­ered recent. Hav­ing said all that, I am going to try to use it more in 2011 to reach out to oth­er tech­ni­cal writ­ers. Just don‘t expect me to love it.