With the exponential adoption of Twitter on top of huge growth of Facebook, here is a timely article comparing their relative attributes. They are different animals, each responding to the basic human need to connect and communicate in different ways, but personally I still think there is a huge question mark over their future success.
They’re fun for a while but as all us who work with a keyboard know, they can swallow a lot of unproductive time. When they go down, we feel cut off as exemplifed in gmail’s outage today. It may be warping our kids’ brains. We also need to ask how effective they are. The concerns about this and why we still plunge into the deluge of information are neatly captured by James Harkin in this article:
The delivery of a continuous stream of messages might well be slowly stretching our brains, turning us into creatures who are better at doing many different things at once. Preliminary studies from neuroscientists and psychologists, however, suggest that in the meantime our brains are likely to become strained and confused if we make too many demands on them. Beyond a certain point, in other words, the productivity bonus that we get from responding to many different streams of information on our information loop at the same time levels off, and begins to slow us down. No matter – many of us enjoy it all the same. The reason why we’re so keen to switch through a range of information streams and constantly jump around between them, in any case, is not at all about doing things more efficiently – it is simply that we have come to appreciate being in the loop for its own sake.
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