Earlier this year, Slate made a satirical video about a new social networking site called Flutter, which has a 26-character limit, for those who find Twitter's 140-character limit excessive. In it, one “nanoblogger” explains, “I was getting really annoyed with how long it took to read everything on Twitter.”
You may laugh, but I'm here to tell you: They might be on to something.
I thought things were supposed to be snappy on Twitter! Pithy! Instead, every other tweet (the cringe-inducing name for Twitter posts) turns out to include a link to some honking online tome. And Twitter is not designed for dialogue: instead of the dinner party that is Facebook, it's like finding your desk awash in magazines and newspapers flagged by friends with “Yo, check it!” and “You gotta read this!”
The sheer volume is imposing. The forum champions brevity, but I suspected that, in actual fact, it was a massive timesuck. How massive? I decided to put aside a day last week to find out.
At the time, I was following 50 people (the vast majority of Twitter users follow fewer than 50 people). First thing in the morning, Twitter was at a low simmer. I enjoyed some aperçus, a little light banter. A journalist I follow began posting media-related links. I moseyed through them. Even though I had made a decision not to follow links from online periodicals pointing me toward their own content, I got bored and broke my own rule, reading a story on a local news blog about people urinating on the walls in my neighbourhood. I did some laundry. And then the heavy hitters got online.
A feature wondering if Google is making us dumber: That thing was thousands of words long! I read it for what seemed like 45 minutes, swatting away impulses to check my e-mail or plan dinner, but when I checked the time, only a quarter of an hour had passed. My attention span had atrophied from gobbling down tweets.
After this revelation, I relaxed, safe in the knowledge that the day was not whizzing by, all scudding Koyaanisqatsi clouds and fast-motion traffic. Then, suddenly, in the middle of another long feature, I snapped. Boring! I had been reading for 54 minutes. I pruned my tomato plants.
Every time I refreshed Twitter, there were more links posted. I began to read faster in the shadow of the mountains of unread content. I felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you suddenly realize you have an exam in an hour. Who posts an entire hour-long podcast? Unreasonable. By 4 o'clock, the stuff was just roaring in. And it wasn't even a big news day.
In the end, I followed up on 44 links between 9 a.m. and 11 p.m. In total, this equalled three hours of power reading. Considering that your standard city dweller gets crazy waiting 10 minutes for public transit, and sometimes doesn't even have time for breakfast (a meal that comes in a box ), this is a massive chunk of the day. Or, to put it in another perspective, the average American spends a mere 45 minutes a month – a month, people! – on newspaper websites.
It seems that what is at work here is a law familiar to anyone who has eaten at a bustling restaurant: the more we clamour to be heard, the more we drown each other out, and thus the harder we try to be heard. In a chattering cyberjungle, confined to communicating in tweets, we've found a way: Our links hint at the untold depths of who each of us is. Whether anyone's actually listening is another question.
My Day:
- First link: A one-minute film
- Last link: Website for “Mad as Hell” pro-health-care-coverage American doctors
- Best link: Essay: Is Google Killing General Knowledge
- Worst link: A page of photos of porcine, glassy-eyed John Gosselin
- Most bang for buck: Photo of snake with clawed foot (beaten to death in China)
- Breaking news: Obama calls Kanye a jackass
- Most prolific tweeter: Walrus magazine, with 17 tweets (only 3 of which were self-promotional!)
- Total number of links followed: 44
- Average time spent following a link: 4 minutes
- Most random information gleaned: blue-green algae can kill dogs; if you break into someone’s house and they defend themselves with a samurai sword, take that business seriously, because it can actually kill you; 107-year-old Malaysian woman’s 22nd husband is 70 years her junior (suck it, Kim Cattrall).
