TEHRAN -- No, this item wasn't really written from Tehran. Then again, neither were the vast majority of the thousands and thousands of Twitter posts about the aftermath of Iran's fraudulent elections in June. That didn't stop the media from declaring the micro-blogging site to be the unsung hero of the burgeoning "Green Revolution."
With Iranian authorities cracking down on traditional media and snooping in on phone calls, the theory went, Twitter became a critical tool for organizing and reporting on what was happening in the streets of Tehran and other cities. Well-meaning Americans tinted their avatars green and changed their location, to show support and keep Iran's security service from tracking activists online. The State Department even asked Twitter to defer scheduled system maintenance in the middle of the whole thing.
By mixing developments in Tehran with your friend's comments on some blog post, Twitter feeds made it all seem so real. Log on to the site and voilà -- suddenly, you could take part in dangerous street protests happening halfway around the world without even looking up from your iPhone! All the drama and the excitement of challenging evil dictators lit up the social network, 140 characters at a time. Twitter users started passing along even the tiniest updates about what was happening in Iran as if getting the information out on the site was a matter of life and death. People stripped out user names as they reposted updates, which was supposed to be to keep security agents from tracking them but had the unintended consequence of making it impossible to weigh whether the information was credible. One activist even began trying to track suspected Iranian Basij intelligence agents on Twitter on his own from Southern California, telling me in fevered e-mails he was battling the regime daily and had won some important victories.
Watching the often terrifying news out of Iran, Twitter users could feel like they were doing something important and making themselves part of the story. That was, unfortunately, probably about all they were doing. "It's slacktivism," Evgeny Morozov, who studies the use of new technology in democracy movements, told me back in June. One study due out next year reportedly found the number of Iranians with access to Twitter was too small for the site to have played any role at all in the summer uprising. (Only a third of people living in the country even have access to the Internet.) But the story was the perfect mix of the old media's obsession with writing about its own decline and the new media's obsession with chronicling its rise. There was no way the facts were going to get in the way.
Sadly, though, six months later, things still haven't changed much in Iran. The "Twitter revolution" story may have been bogus, but there was something uplifting in how, for a brief moment, Americans looked up from their day-to-day obsessions and found something deeper to pay attention to. Which is probably why it couldn't last. By the end of June, Twitter had -- as is its wont -- moved on, en masse, from Iran to an even more horrifying development: the death of Michael Jackson.
One minute, your two-year-old child is playing around in the backyard. The next, he isn't breathing. How long before you tweet about it? How long before you tell your followers on Twitter that he died?
If you're fortunate, you'll never find out the answer. But on Monday, Shellie Ross, a Florida mother and blogger who tweets under the name "Military Mom," did. Early that evening, she was sending out random, mundane updates about her dogs and roosters and the fog coming in. At 5:22 p.m., she tweeted, "Fog is rolling in thick scared the birds back in the coop." A few minutes later, a 911 call came in from her 11-year-old son that his brother was unconscious in their pool. At 6:12 p.m., Ross sent out the tweet, "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool." Later that evening, at 11:08 p.m., when it was clear her son Bryson was gone, she posted a Twitpic, "Remembering my million dollar baby." Two minutes later, she posted another. "One more because I love him so."
Overnight, there was an outpouring of sympathy and concern for the bereft mother, whose husband is serving overseas. Tonight from 9-10 p.m., The Online Mom blog is hosting a Twitter event to help Ross pay for a box for her child's ashes. But this being the Internet, the critics have been coming out of the woodwork as well.
Amid the general handwringing about what technology hath wrought in our lives, fellow mom blogger Madison McGraw took it upon herself to promptly ask, "Remember the Balloon Boy Hoax? Who would be tweeting the death of their child? Where is the news story?" After the story had been confirmed, she went into blame mode, asking, "Did you read her timeline? ALWAYS twittering. Reckless parents need 2 held accountable 2 prevent others." One user took the opportunity – several of them in fact, to state, " I would keep my 2 YR OLD away from pool by paying attn."
Ross has since removed the original post asking for prayers, as well as the photos of her son. But she has come out swinging against her online attackers, telling one naysayer to "go get bent you fuck tard" and telling McGraw "where us your heart bitch." (sic)
If you've ever had something shocking and unfathomable happen to you or a loved one – and I hope to God you haven't – you may have surprised yourself with your response. You may have clung to the most familiar routines of your day, going through the most reassuring motions you could find. You may have done a load of laundry or watched a movie or finished a bowl of cereal, not because you were so engrossed in your cereal but because your brain and your body didn't know what the hell else to do. In "Aphrodite," Isabel Allende writes movingly of standing at the stove, stirring rice pudding as she grieved for her daughter. And if she were a blogger, who knows? Maybe she would have blogged.
When I asked a military wife friend today if she thought Ross's behavior was especially unusual, she said, "We perceive Twitter as a frivolity broadcast network. But it's also an emergency broadcast network. Grief is a state of temporary insanity. You have no idea what you'll do." It's probably no coincidence that Facebook's Army Wife Network today posted this message: "Reminding you all that what is posted here is PUBLIC for everyone to view. Please PLEASE watch Operational Security and your details but also remember that PERCEPTION is reality. What we say, that someone might read could allow them to form an opinion of military families in general. Just be careful!"
Last night I was out with a friend who works in Florida EMS. We sat in a bar, and she told me about the two or thee deaths she sees every shift. I asked her today if she'd ever seen anybody Tweeting during an accident. She said no, but added, "I've seen a lot of situations. Is there any 'appropriate' reaction to a tragedy? There isn't."
Social-media site Twitter plans to scrap its hand-picked list of "suggested users" to follow after controversy erupted over the selection of people on the list, a company executive said Monday.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company was seeking a more systematic way to introduce its prominent posters, including sports figures, celebrities and politicians, to newcomers to the site.
"That list will be going away," Stone told reporters on the sidelines of a conference for young entrepreneurs in Malaysia's capital, Putrajaya. "In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions."
Twitter's list, which numbers around 500 suggested users, proved controversial after its launch earlier this year. Recently, political watchdogs in California criticized the list, claiming it favors Democrats over Republicans in the state's gubernatorial race next year.
Stone and other company employees choose who will be featured on the list. Twitter has said the list is based on users "who show that they provide value by posting often and engaging with their followers."
Stone indicated the suggestions could eventually be tailored to new users' interests, though he did not elaborate. Nor did he say when the list would be removed or replaced.
Twitter plans to add other new features, including an easier, faster way to forward messages, and wants to be translated into more languages, Stone said. It is presently available in English, Japanese and Spanish.
"Ninety-seven percent of our efforts are basically on delivering user value," he said. "Everyone is still experimenting. It's still young, it's still early. Anything goes right now as we figure out what works and what doesn't work."
The popularity of San Francisco-based Twitter, which allows users to post 140-character messages sharing everything from mundane details about their lives to major news, has soared. The number of users increased more than tenfold within a year to 54 million currently.
------
On the Net:
Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced "cool," as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants -- again, as such things usually are.
The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that's all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as "exquisite corpse," the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America's line of "distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks," and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?
Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children's fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. "Coraline" taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of "A Wrinkle in Time," and so on, but Gaiman's limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning "The Graveyard Book" performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but -- and here's the rub -- impossible to equal.
Gaiman's kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, "Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, 'We don't love you anymore.'" What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes -- all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).
The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted -- from "Coraline," from "Alice in Wonderland," from "The Wizard of Oz" and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés -- to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you've seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam's exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.
Here's how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman's involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn't keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be "writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman" elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this "gatekeeping" role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn't seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.
It's tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. "Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction," Delaney once wrote, "it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader."
Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you're only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you're going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development ("Suddenly" has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama ("'No!' The Queen shrieked, 'this will not be allowed! He is mine!'") or articulations of some grand insight or theme ("You have to face her. She's part of you"). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.
Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of "a Neil Gaiman story" ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you'd expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur -- "'Sir, do you know what is this egg?' Asked Sam to the badger. 'Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.'" (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field -- no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.
Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: "'Events are already in motion,' the Prince said. 'We must act'"; "Sam screamed 'Nooooo'" "'Sam! Listen to me!' the Prince shouted, 'You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!'" I was thinking they'd managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable "Don't die on me, damn it!" -- when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, "No, you can't die!"
The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being "enveloped" or "engulfed" in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy -- much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.
Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn't especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from "Coraline," "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Snow White"), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn't love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She'd collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.
Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers ("It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized ..."), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It's so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group's self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, "You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters." (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: "When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room." Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you've got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, "I don't know how to put it together!" She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they're all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn't over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol' "It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic" finish was seriously contemplated.
At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, "Where do you get your ideas?" but the real question is "How do you make sense of your ideas?" Delany believed that good writers read so much that they "internalize" certain "literary models" and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story's proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
But gather together a hundred people who don't really know how to do this and they're still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents -- eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste -- rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.
Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that's another matter. As Delany put it, "While many -- or even most -- people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in ... new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can." Not many people, and certainly no crowds.
So Pepsi creates a sophomoric iPhone app, ostensibly to help guys pick up chicks, but really just as marketing for its Amp energy drink, and women get upset, because it is sexist and insulting. Sample proposed pickup line to get the "artist" gal to swoon into your arms: "You know the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. I wonder what else she shaves."
Embarrassed by the tweet-storm that follows (or, more likely, delighted at the publicity gained from a Wall Street Journal story covering the contretemps), Pepsi twitters an apology.
"Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women. We apologize if it's in bad taste & appreciate your feedback."
Maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm quite impressed with how, in just under 140 characters, Pepsi managed to drag all of civilization down a new, hitherto unplumbed, nadir.
First of all, as the legendary Susan McCarthy once explained in Salon, "sorry if" does not constitute an apology. Making jokes about Mona Lisa shaving her bush is in bad taste, period. No ifs, ands or buts about it. We're not wading in an ambiguous swamp of postmodern contextuality here -- no, we're stuck, hip-deep in the mud. If you're gonna own up, Pepsi, then just own up. No "sorry ... ifs."
Secondly, the to/2 swap looked dumb when Prince first starting doing it 25 years ago, and it still looks dumb now. Don't get me wrong: While I am often mocked by my texting and instant messaging correspondents for my compulsion to properly capitalize and punctuate my evanescent communications (seriously, I am the only person I know who uses semicolons in texts), I am not a stickler for immaculate prose in the aforementioned media. When in a hurry, I have been known to indulge in time- and character-saving abbreviations. But Pepsi's oh-so-cute use of "2" instead of "to" has all the look of a focus-grouped apology format that assumes that today's Pepsi generation will be mollified by the au courant cyber-colloquialisms of online discourse. No. Pepsi is wrong. It just looks stupid. And their tweet had 12 characters to spare anyway, so it was also totally unnecessary.
So, a purposely dumbed-down, fake and insufficient apology for a trumped up controversy designed to generate angry rants just like the one I'm pounding out on my keyboard now so as to push sales of an energy drink that is undoubtedly not good for one's health if consumed in large quantities. Arrgh.
New data on the way Internet use breaks down by gender seems to confirm some long-held stereotypes. Marisa Taylor at the Wall Street Journal reports that women outnumber men 57 percent to 43 percent on Facebook and Twitter. We also make up nearly two-thirds of MySpace users. Brian Solis, who crunched the numbers, summarizes his findings in no uncertain terms: "The point of interest that's worth review and discussion is that in social media, women rule."
The knee-jerk explanation for Solis' findings looks something like this: Ladies like to chat, share intimate details of their lives and keep in touch with friends they haven't seen in person since grade school. Menfolk don't have time for such social frivolity. (Or hey, maybe they're just too busy trolling the Web for porn.)
And perhaps there is some truth to that received wisdom: While the vast majority of young people I know are on Facebook, the few remaining holdouts are mostly guys. They call it a time suck, a forum for compulsive oversharing, a creepy place where people you hated in high school resurface out of nowhere, pretending to be your best friend.
But now that we know who isn't on Facebook, it's surprising to see who is: A recent study by Rapleaf, a "social-media-data company," found that "married women between the ages 35 and 50 are the fastest-growing segment of social-networking users." The WSJ doesn't speculate as to why this might be, but I have a theory. Now that even elementary school kids are well-versed in social media, moms I know have made it their business to have a presence on the sites. And while they may initially only be there to ensure their children's safety, many eventually learn to love the online communities for their own purposes, too.
But even if stereotypically "feminine" reasons -- socializing, parenting -- are drawing women to the sites, social media may still do great things to increase our power in the working world. Most people I know who use Twitter, for instance, are there for professional reasons. Plus, as the WSJ notes, women are also dominating Ning, a site that allows users to create their own social networks. We're neck and neck with men on YouTube and LinkedIn, too. So instead of just blabbering and mothering, our time spent on social media sites may help us hone real skills and make important professional connections. All things considered, we could actually be shattering those other pervasive gender stereotypes -- that ladies and technology don't mix, and that Internet geekdom is an overwhelmingly male domain.
The new data should also give women unprecedented power in the online marketplace: According to Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, "the future of social media is going to be all about the women." Hopefully, this realization about women's growing facility with technology will filter down to computer and video game manufacturers, who might consider this a good time to stop treating women as an exotic and hard-to-crack niche market, to be coddled, cooed at and condescended to.
Twitter won't bring down Ahmadinejad
The real action in Iran is in the streets. Social media is documenting the revolution -- not leading it.
By Mike Madden, Salon
Call me Ishmael. The end.
Cellphone novels, the rage in Japan, now have competition in America: Twitter fiction.
By Barry Yourgrau, Salon
Why can't we concentrate?
Twitter and e-mail aren't making us stupider, but they are making us more distracted. A new book explains why learning to focus is the key to living better.
By Laura Miller, Salon
Twitter for Business FAQ
All the ways Twitter can improve the way your business operates.
By Meryl Evans, GigaOM
For Twitter C.E.O., well-orchestrated accidents
Twitter founder Evan Williams attributes his success to "hallucinogenic optimism."
By Evan Williams, The New York Times
The Daily Show: Twitter frenzy
Jon Stewart and Samantha Bee take on Twittering in this video.
Do Good Mommies Tweet?
Twitter Hacked by the "Iranian Cyber Army"
qq
What would you change about the Nutrition Facts Panel?
So this is what we do when we get old(er)