The Great Echo Chamber

Norcross Jul 6th, 2010General Ramblings

Quick! Tell me if you’ve heard about this recently: That's pretty scary, isn't it? Although I'd probably be more concerned with the vampire being out in the daylight. That would basically make him immortal, and thus we'd all be fucked.

  • Apple put out a new version of the iPhone, and apparently people were a bit upset about a few things.
  • Today (July 5th) was the day that Doc set on the Delorean to ‘25 years in the future’ (for the record, it isn’t).
  • Steve Jobs wrote something about Flash to Adobe.
  • A goal was scored in the World Cup.
  • Someone’s giving away some shit.
  • Twilight. Enough said.
  • The guy from Zappos wrote an article about selling his company.
  • …the list goes on…

Of course, I’m talking about twitter. It seems lately whenever something hits the ol’ Twit with a modicum of interest, the RTs begin in earnest. One or two trickle in , then the wave begins. 10 at a time. Then 10 or 20 more.

So I have to ask: Has twitter become the new email forward?

I sure as shit hope not. I like twitter. It’s amusing, I’m able to have conversations with people, and I even get some work out of it (quite a bit, actually). But between the recent outages, the reply spam, and now seeing the same article / link 30 times in a day, it’s beginning to wear thin. It’s noise. You aren’t contributing. For all the talk about community and connections, it’s one step above fucking spam. Yes, I’m all for sharing information. That’s the point. But is there any benefit to perpetuating this? Am I wrong here? By all means, correct me if that’s the case.

7 Responses to “The Great Echo Chamber”

  1. Trish

    This is why I firmly believe in the idea that if you Retweet something, you only do it if you can add to the conversation. Retweeting without adding simply creates noise; I don’t think anyone benefits from seeing the same damn link or article retweeted fifty times. It’s like releasing a super bouncy ball in a giant empty room; it just bounces off the walls forever and ever and ever and ever….

  2. Joel

    One step above spam…

    Sometimes it is…a lot of the time it’s worse 🙂

    • Norcross

      I tend to agree. At least I have a spam filter in my email. I’ve gone so far as to set up temporary filters in TweetDeck for when certain articles / topics become ‘hot’ just so I can actually see the shit I care about.

      • Joel

        True. I have to go through my twitter list of people I follow and clean it out every month to get rid of the people just spewing crap. I try to be selective and only follow people I’m interested in, but I find I make some bad judgment calls and follow people who end up self-promoting the crap out of themselves. Ugh. And I still only follow 130ish people. I really don’t understand how or why anyone would follow thousands and thousands of people…why make yourself wade through so much junk?

  3. Ruth

    Wonder woman got a new outfit!

    Yeah, sometimes it drives me nuts. What I really wish was that Twitter would reinstate that option which lets you control whether or not you see Twitter-style RTs in your timeline. I had that turned off for a couple people and it worked great.

  4. nicopolitan

    I have to de-lurk and join the chorus (echo chamber?) on this: the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten so freaking loud. I’m someone who works in social media so I’m supposed to follow all of these experts and networkers but a lot of them are saying the same thing over and over and to each other.

    Using lists has helped me out somewhat since it’s apparently a faux pas to unfollow, but it isn’t enough. There should be guidelines for advanced tweeting and I would not be opposed to nominating you for writing it since you’ve got a head start here.

    • Norcross

      Funny enough, I’ve enjoyed twitter because there are no ‘rules’ to follow. I cuss and swear, and yet I’ve had some success with it. Granted, I couldn’t ever be charged with following all those folks. I don’t have the stomach for it.