Twitter is a platform of immediacy – it’s all about what’s happening right now so checking my timeline during the day is a pretty rush affair – during a couple of minutes between meetings, or while grabbing lunch. I try to keep abreast but this is often not possible.
I had a quiet moment tonight after a day of work which kept me away from the feed so I sat down to catch up with 7 hours unread tweets. It was during this time that I was moved in a twilight zone sort of way.
The subjects covered through live tweets during the course of the day were:
- Military coup underway in Egypt
- Mandela family graves being exhumed
- Andy Murray playing in Wimbledon
- A teacher who wore the same outfit in yearbook photos for 40 years
- Random tweets that were deep and mundane in equal measure
From the very important to the vapidly unnecessary, it was all there and I could get it all during a quiet moment in which I was not definitely not alone. When you’ve taken the time to get to know Twitter you feel it’s transformative power. What makes it out of the twilight zone is that the mundane and the important are presented on equal footing. Despite it’s power it’s that lack of differentiation that makes it disturbing.
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