Twitter: The New Telegraph?

Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Culture, Media, Technology, Web, blogging

Well howdy, this here blog seems to have got a bit dusty.

This is not due to any lack of things to post, I’d argue it’s due to a mixture of workload and twitter, but alas I’m back, for a while. Seeing as I’ve blamed twitter, and I’m currently doing work based on it, I’m just gonna share a blogpost on the subject of twitter that I’ve recently read by Nicholas Carr. I don’t know much about him, but I have read his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google” and I can firmly recommend it.

In his blog post, originally posted 18/03/07, He addresses the assertion that Twitter is simply the remediation of the telegraph, he states:

Only on the length of each message is a limit imposed. Because there’s no charge to send a message and no protocol governing the frequency of posting, you can send as many tweets as you want. The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it! (If you’re sending or receiving tweets on your cell phone, though, you best have an all-you-can eat messaging plan; Twitter is, among other things, a killer app for the wireless oligopoly.) You can also send each tweet to as large an audience as you want, and the recipients are free to read it via mobile phone, instant messaging, RSS, or web site. Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.

It’s a great little read, he also briefly covers post modernism in relation to twitter so I recommend you go over and read the whole thing over at his thoroughly interesting blog.

Permalink | December 8th, 2009

2 Responses to “Twitter: The New Telegraph?”

  1. Digimodernist Says:
    December 9th, 2009 at 12:25 pm

    Postmodernism is dead; comparing Twitter to it is like linking the railway to Renaissance art. Digimodernism (which encompasses Twitter) has superseded it.

  2. unluckydip Says:
    December 9th, 2009 at 12:59 pm

    What I should have in fact put is post postmodernism, which I believe would have encompassed digimodernism; which I must admit is somewhat new to me. So thanks for pointing that out. May just have to go read up on digimodernism.

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