When only 'My Mob' rules - bewitched twittered and beleagured

Hypocrisy, or something more complex?

• It seems that since Twitter has gone mainstream (for which my references include:

The Age newspaper
The BBC
Sydney Morning Herald
Channel 9
We've heard about famous twitterers from Demi Moore to Senator Conroy (fake and real, with the fake attracting far more attention) and Malcolm Turnbull, KRudd and Stephen Fry, to mention a few.  It seems that everyone is Twittering. 

So why the hostility and animosity from the web community.  The violins are out in full.

"It's all over"

"They've taken over our Twitter"

There's an avalanche of video and blog posts predicting the end of Twitter as we know it. Ridiculing those who are 'Twitter' addicted. Why the animosity.

Surely we wanted this - we wanted people to get it - we've spent columns of text, video, print trying to convince the world that this was the way of communication in the future. "Mob Rules", "Crowd Sourcing"

I'm taking my ball and going home!

Now that the crowd has come, we're not interested any more.  We don't want to play. 

It turns out that the crowd in Twitter is just like real life.. It's mundane and sophisticated, interesting and boring. We have what we wanted, a small microcosm of life. It is uncomfortable to be woken from the illusion that we are special.

it turns out that to change the world, we will have to put up with the marketers, the ignorant and those that do just want to talk about chocolate. 

The question now is what we do in this space, are we prepared to act, to do the hard stuff?

Can we do the hard stuff:  We need leadership not cynicism!

Twitterati, I think we need to have a good hard look at ourselves.  

• Do we want people involved?
• Are we surprised that those new to Twitter are clumsy with it.
• Were we sophisticated in our Twitter usage when we started?
• Are we sophisticated now?

Does it matter so long as we continue to have the opportunity to network globally?

Are we prepared to look at this next stage and work with it, to find out where it goes, or are we going to be too busy looking for the next phenomenon?

We started it - are we prepared to finish it?  It's leadership we need now not cynicism. We don't know where it's going, so how can we possibly know that this next bit is wrong?

Comments

[Gary Barber]

You know I have often wondered these points as the world has discovered twitter.

I have also watched and waited for people to move on. To take that step away from twitter to the next big thing. So far there is no next big thing.

We need to be patient and foster the noobs and build community.

Still doesn't mean I have to like the overnight "social media experts"

[Harriet Wakelam]

Oooooh yes, I hear you - on both counts - building community and rules takes time, but hey guys, do we all have to be overnight experts :)

[Rachel]

Before moving to Australia I worked for a major network news station. Twitter was literally part of my job description. We would have hour long meetings just about the damn Twitter. I love it, LOVE IT, but it was the overanalyzing of it that made me furious. On top of that, idiots in sales were constantly "Twitter is over you know...it's done, it's so old now." This from people who didn't even HAVE Twitter accounts and were just parroting some little bit they caught in one of their industry magazines because they were too lazy to sign up and figure it out themselves. A mob being on Twitter? GOOD. For a news station that's a beautiful thing. That's more people who can receive our content from us and from others. But on top of that, more people we can search through for information about breaking news or find local sources that have experienced things or saw events. It took a lot of patience and lot of biting my tongue as our reporters (after more than six months of me begging them to get on) excitedly discovered twitter and began stumbling through it, but me giving them attitude and rolling my eyes like an ubernerd was only going to clip those lines of communication.