All that twitters is not gold

By Doug Koop  |  Editorial Director

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Let's talk first about the upside of Twitter. It's a cool technology that allows users to make short text notices available to almost anybody at almost anytime from almost anywhereâ€"an information enthusiast's idea of paradise. It is capable of delivering immediate updates from people on the scene of anything that's happening. In brief, it provides quick and efficient communication.

Brief is a good word here. The principal virtue of Twitter is brevity. Messages are limited to 140 characters. You tell your story in a "tweet." Such concision increases readership, largely because the information can be ingested in seconds. It also increases authorship, because one can publish in mere seconds as well. A Twitter feed in an electronic device is an easy morsel to pick up, a flutter of manna in the hungry desert.

The trouble begins, of course, with the multiplicity of morsels. The virtue of accessibility has the downside of deluge. The ability to hear from anybody at anytime from anywhere creates some obligation to connect with all the possibilities out there. David Daniels found this out. The longtime pastor and mission director signed up because his son asked him to. "I enjoyed his updates, knowing where he was and what he was doing throughout the day," reports Daniels on his blog www.wisereader.com).

"On my second day of Twitter, I began receiving notices that others were following me.... It did not take long for me to realize that those following me were hoping I would return the favour. But the day I discovered the CEO of a major Christian publisher was following me, I began thinking about the whole concept behind twittering. I went to this CEO's twitter site and was amazed to see that he was following over 9,000 Twitters�. Clearly no one is really 'following' 9,000 Twitters per day (or week for that matter). So what was this really about?"

Daniels quit Twitter after just a few days because "it served no useful purposes in my life" and was a distraction from more meaningful ministry. He quickly came to believe that his time and attention could be more fruitfully directed. Others have similar experiences. The sheer banality of many tweets is a needless detour from more constructive activity. Like a lab rat pumping a lever with a random hope of scoring a food pellet, Twitter encourages users to skim through reams of drivel with optimistic anticipation of encountering a nugget of real news. The potential to be riveting can also be tedious.

Twitter is now in vogue and will be high profile for a season. It's the hot new restaurant in town, garnering rave reviews and boasting long lineups. In a little while it will find its natural place and become an establishment with its own cast of regulars and a constant but ever-changing stream of mostly satisfied users.

Marshall McLuhan famously observed that at first we shape our tools, but then our tools shape us. Twitter is a stellar example of our fast-paced culture's breathless urgency to get noticed, and how the very pursuit shortens our attention spans to ever-smaller increments. Our ability to be attentive is compromised by our need to be noticed. Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" have now shrunk to 140 characters of text.

At a deeper level, the Twitter phenomenon hearkens to a mystifying paradox at the heart of human existence. How do we reconcile the immense importance of each individualâ€"the sense that we have meaning and purpose in lifeâ€"with the vast informality of life as a wholeâ€"the fact that billions of people are alive at this time and that millions perish each day like leaves falling in an October wind?

The Christian gospel addresses this troubling inconsistency with a message of comfort and care. The God of the Bible is vast and universal, extending His great love to all people at all time in all places. But He is also very personal, aware of the number of hairs on our heads and attentive to the tweet of a sparrow that falls to the ground (Matthew 10:29-30).

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