Lower Wisdom

[Via SharperIron] This recent article in Time Magazine, about a church in Michigan that encourages congregants to use Twitter, has generated a lot of discussion.  The Seattle Times ran a similar story months ago, about Twitter usage at Mars Hill in Seattle.

The discussion is mostly of the moralizing sort: “should we allow this strange technology?”  I would like to focus on a different aspect of Twitter and religion, which is the tendency toward an idolatrous “strike a pose” form of communication encouraged by the medium of Twitter.

My job involves working with these social networking technologies and the companies who create them.  As such, I was one of the early adopters of Twitter, and worked with the guys at Twitter to use Twitter at one of the very first conferences to do so.  I have been using it for years, so I know a thing or two about the medium.

There are some important characteristics about Twitter that dramatically influence how it is used:

1. Each person “follows” a large number of people and has many “followers”.  All these conversations are going on at once.  This means that communication is very noisy, and everyone is listening to multiple conversations at once.  This is not conducive to in-depth treatment of any subject.  Twitter the on-line equivalent of a noisy night club.
2. Messages are limited to 140 characters.  You need to use even less than 140 characters if you want people to be able to re-tweet your messages.  This means that you need to focus on communicating in small sound bites and one-liners.
3. Twitter is generally something you do when you have brief moments of boredom and aren’t sitting in front of a TV or XBox.  These are generally social contexts, like sitting at a conference, having dinner with the parents, or sitting in class.  The social context reinforces the mentality of wanting to impress one’s friends with a witty one-liner.

Because of these constraints, Twitter is very useful for the sorts of communications that would take place at a night club: sharing advice about good restaurants in the area, telling funny jokes, letting people know that the food sucks, or dropping casual hints to your time in the peace corps to impress your peers.  If you spend any time at all on Twitter, you quickly see that this is true.  Twitter is not conducive to deep or meaningful communication.

Dissidens recently made this insightful comment on his blog (emphasis added):

“If there was anything that was typical of “marginalized people”, they turned it into a pose: dress, profanity, body art, indie music, child-rearing, queer theory”

“They turned it into a pose” exactly captures my feeling about Twitter.  The medium all but guarantees that people will focus on well-practiced poses intended to impress others in 140 characters or less.

What dissidens describes is pervasive to human nature.  Children often put on Spider-Man or Princess costumes and, for a moment, become the character.  By the time we are adults, we are still wearing costumes and striking poses, but we forget that it’s make-believe.

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Nowhere is this more succinctly illustrated than in night clubs.  Everyone has a carefully constructed facade, well-honed one-liners, and the strobe lights serve to freeze people’s coolest dance poses as snapshots in time. Everyone is star of their own movie.  And nowhere is this club culture more exaggerated than in the underground Gay “Ball Culture”.

For modern gay people, sexuality is often considered to be the core of their identity.  It is a strange time in history when a person’s sexual desires come to wholly identify him, and this obsession with projected identity can lead to behaviors like cross-dressing and transgender surgeries.  These cross-dressing gay and transgendered people, who epitomize the most extreme mentality of “becoming your costume”, have created the ultimate symbol for “striking a pose”.  The underground “Ball” is essentially a posing contest, where groups of cross-dressers compete to see who can strike the “best” pose.  It’s like an underground Rave or House Party, but these participants don’t waste time with the non-essentials.  They cut right to the chase.  If you’re going to strike a pose, you might as well do it right!

If you want a vivid image of this part of human nature taken to it’s extreme, you can watch the critically-acclaimed movie, Paris Is Burning (on YouTube).  It’s the documentary of the Ball scene that inspired Madonna’s song Vogue.