I Have Been (Politely) Asked to Get a Clue
Because part of my job entails strategizing with and for clients about social media, and because it would be useful to my professional development if I appeared to have at least a passing familiarity with Twitter and Facebook and the like, it’s been suggested that I start engaging on a social network or two.
Mind you, my only complaint about Twitter is that it doesn’t accomodate me: I can’t say anything useful in less than 700 words, much less 170 characters. But the fact that I wonder out loud about who would be able to use a medium so constrained virtually assures that hundreds of millions of people will flock to it immediately. (You could say I have a history of mistiming these things; Back in ‘94, I thought AOL was the Dumbest Investment Ever. I was feeling pretty bad about that call for the next 6 years or so and then, not so much.)
Of one thing I’m certain: the more people there are who begin twittering, or blogging, or Geocity-ing, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio will be. I seem to harp on this issue about once every three years, so this time I’ll be brief: if the value of a network increases following Metcalf’s law, then it would seem an equally valid heuristic that the worth of any one node will decrease proportionally.
Right now, there is bird tweeting in my backyard (for real; he doesn’t have a cell phone.) Tomorrow, if there were a billion birds in my backyard doing the exact same thing, I doubt it would be as pleasant.
To any one listener, a single voice can be beautiful, profound, profane or intruiging. But a billion voices are rarely anything other than noise.
2 years ago • Notes