I love my microblogs. They’re a lot more fluid than my “real” blog (the one you’re reading), I think. I’ve said this before, but I think they end up giving a more accurate picture of me because there’s very little forethought in them. Jason Kottke may have gotten it right:
[microblogs are] minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
He said that in 2005 (!) while describing what was then a new phenomenon being called “tumblelogs,” but it certainly still applies. I use my Tumblr, Twitter and Posterous accounts mainly to share the flotsam and jetsam of daily internet chatter that appeals to me (and hopefully the people who follow me). The allure of that kind of publishing is undeniable. It’s astonishing, really, that anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the internet can be a more prolific producer of web content than anyone would have imagined 5-10 years ago.
And now we’re at the point that microblogging is a requirement for anyone with a product or a point. There has scarcely been a marketing plan in the past 3 years that didn’t include Twitter and Facebook (status updates qualify as a microblog). So why all this noise?
Nav Dhami suggested an interesting answer with a decidedly neurochemical bent. In discussing a psychological study about manic thinking, he equates Twitter with a certain kind of sustained brain activity:
My ‘Tweets’ are usually posted in relatively short bursts of activity, and I suspect this may be the case with most other microbloggers. Every time I post 8-10 Tweets in one session, the frenetic activity does leave me with a palpable dopamine surge.
To me, the explanation seems a little simpler. Narcissism. We all feel like we have something important to say, and this applies to companies too (it actually seems to be the point of marketing to turn an object into a very self-obsessed person, but that’s another discussion altogether). The desire to feel special is now just matched by the technology to do it.
I plan to focus on a few of these technologies over the next few days to try to figure out their appeal. Next up, we’ll dissect Tumblr and see if there’s a reason it became the “it” blog for slanty-haired, American Apparel wearing, angst-ridden kids around the world.