Sunday 14 February 2010

Twitter Logic

Twice. Two times. That's the amount of times I've tried to explain Twitter to someone. On both occasions i failed miserably and the reason was quite simple. The persons involved failed to see the relevance of the service. Technology is great, but it's needs to be the correct tool for that person. I signed up to Twitter nearly four months before i really started using the service. Why? I just didn't know what what to do with it.

Sixteen weeks or so later, i had it. I would use the service as a link distributor. I find brilliant photo websites all the time with photography that i adore/love//loathe/admire, so it made sense that i could use the 140 characters available on Twitter to briefly describe the photography and link to it. Brilliant! To that role i also added some of my own photographs/snapshots and the occasional mention of what I'm up to. Twelve months on, the formula seems to work. The technology works... for me.

So why am i mentioning all this? Well I've noticed recently that many people seem to expect easy answers from technology. They don't give things time to ferment and develop. People want things instantaneously. In the end, the creative process comes from within us, ourselves, and we need to realise that that technology is just an instrument , a tool to create, interpret and distribute this creativity, nothing else. In the end technology can't do the creative work for us, and would we want it to do so if it could.

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