The Wiki Man | 1 August 2009

Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry.

Exhibit A in Rod Liddle’s case against Twitter two weeks ago was a painful (but hardly representative) post by Stephen Fry. Exhibit B was a quotation from a sceptical ‘youth’ report written by a teenage intern at Morgan Stanley, who suggested that because he and his school-age contemporaries didn’t use Twitter, it was doomed. Hmmm.

This report did make me wonder how many people would want to befriend anyone whose idea of fun at age 15 is to work in a bank. But, even if his inference was wrong, his facts are largely right. Most people his age don’t need Twitter. For one thing, they don’t have many friends. Plus they already have an existing social network which serves them quite well: it’s called school.

When everyone you know lives or works in the same place, Twitter isn’t much use. It’s later in life, with that diaspora of friendship which follows a move to university or a new city that the thing begins to make sense. It provides people with a simple and painless way to keep up to date with the everyday lives of people dispersed hundreds of miles apart, and maintain that selfless exchange of random nuggets of information which is one of the foundations of friendship. Before condemning the apparently self-aggrandising ways people broadcast their daily trivia on Twitter, never forget the value of the unseen exchanges and responses that these generate. Think of a typical drinks party: without the coincidences, the chance eavesdroppings, the random connections, there would be no point in going. The value of Twitter comes when you are overheard.