There’s been an overwhelming amount of love for Twitter this year, but Larry King might be single handedly responsible for starting my disenchantment with the most recent installment of the seemingly annual progression of the latest and greatest social media wunderkinds. To be fair, my disenchantment began a few months ago, but a tweet a few days ago (2:58PM on July 26 to be exact) from Larry King’s official Twitter account (@kingsthings) sealed the deal:
Larry, I’ve got some news for you. For at least three reasons Twitter is the absolutely, positively WRONG medium to use for finding out why a Marathon is 26.2 miles.
First off, Larry, it demonstrates what we’ve kinda been suspecting all along – namely that you’re a no-talent, hack who’s risen to your station through merely the arbitrary caprice of fortune. The standard answer to this question is pretty much conventional wisdom. I’ve taught middle school kids that could answer it.
Second, Larry, you can actually get your answer faster by using this crazy, new technology called a search engine. I’m sure this whole Internet thing is probably brand new to you and has to be pretty confusing (in fact, it’s probably pretty safe to assume that you’ve got some ghost writer Tweeting on your behalf to solicit the questions for your interview with Colin Powell that you’re unable to prepare on your own). But just in case you actually do get on the Internet someday, I created a demonstration of how this new-fangled thing called a “search engine” can help you find answers to life’s persistent questions. Just CLICK HERE to see how it works! Then, to get your answer click on the blue, underlined text at the top of the page that says “Marathon – Wikipedia the free encyclopedia”.
Third, Larry, the answer is actually more nuanced than you might think at first blush. Turns out that the distance from Marathon to Athens is shorter than 26.2 miles. Turns out that primary historical sources disagree about whehter or not the first “Marathon runner” ran before or after the battle of Marathon. Turns out that the 26.2 mile distance was the result of a series of last-minute changes made to the first modern marathon route established for the 1908 Olympics in London. Maybe you knew that the standard answer wasn’t 100% accurate (I doubt it). But even if I stretch my imagination beyond the comprehensible and give you this benefit of the doubt, the fact still remains that crowd sourcing via your celebrity Twitter account is the least effective and most time consuming way to actually get your answer. Just take a look at the overwhelming volume of responses your question generated by CLICKING HERE. You’ll notice something pretty quickly: a lot of people know some version of the standard answer, but nobody agrees on the more nuanced details. If you’re really into crowd sourcing your answer, you should just cut to the chase and go to Wikipedia where the crowd sourcing has already been done for you. Plus, Wikipedia has at least a modicum of editing that’s gone into their content.
Which brings me back to how Larry King finally brought about my disenchantment with Twitter. In short, Twitter has become filled with crap and wading through all that crap takes more time and effort than regular people should have to put into it. It takes a considerable investment of one’s time to follow Jeb’s advice about having a meaningful online converstaion and craft your Twitter network to a manageable level so that it’s actually useful and doesn’t become a ridiculous time sink. What we need first and foremost in an answer is “correctness”. I have yet to find a better way to get “correctness” than by identifying an authority that can be trusted. It’s way too easy to present the appearance of authoritativeness on the web without actually being an authority. Just look at all the self-proclaimed authorities who wound up giving Larry a technically incorrect answer to his question. Finding an authority is hard work (even off line). Crowd sourcing via Twitter doesn’t get you any closer to an authoritative answer. It just compounds the problem (especially when you use a celebrity account). I know it’s tempting to think that crowd sourcing via Twitter is the way to go when it’s been so successful for Wikipedia, but Twitter just doesn’t work like Wikipedia.
I used to think that Twitter was pretty cool and pretty useful before the proliferation of celebrity accounts from the likes of Larry, Oprah and Martha. So it looks like I am now beating Jeb to the punch in writing his next latest-social-media-fad-jumps-the-shark-blog-post. Why is it that all these social media sites go through the same cycle of explosive growth that eventually brings about their demise? I suspect it’s because no one’s figured out a really good way to make the hard work of identifying authorities become easy. Finding an answer “that works” by playing a numbers game through social media sites can work OK for a while so long as the numbers stay fairly small. However, once they reach their critical mass these social media fads just implode. Plus, playing the social media numbers games just skirts the fact that the answer is by no means guaranteed to be authoritative. In attempting to make finding an authority easy, Twitter seems to have thrown their lot in with the celebrities. Or have the celebrities high-jacked Twitter? Either way, that celebrities have made a good thing bad should be pretty self-evident. I hate to say it but it seems that counting backlinks and other artificial “signs of trust” like the search engine algorithms do is the best thing we’ve got going so far.
So, Google don’t be worried by Jeb’s post that opined whether Twitter is a Google-slayer. It isn’t and it won’t be. In fact, it’ll probably be something our kids and grandkids reference when making fun of our generation. I can already hear my daughter incredulously asking her friends, “Can you believe our parents spent their time at work reading ghost writers typing ‘In da house ATL!!!’ on some rapper’s Twitter account?”.
And if you’re wondering, yes, I probably woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. So feel free to flame me in the comments below for being so hard on the beloved institutions like Larry King and Twitter. But be forewarned: I’ll probably be just as snarky in my responses as I am now.
