Sunday, November 8, 2009

And now...when Twitter won't work

So soon it happened. Can't agree more this with this article on TechCrunch. The article is not really about tweets breaking the news out from Fort Hood base. But more why we as a society has gone to egoist and deprived of human emotions. With as the sociological and psychological part of it left aside, such situations are always a challenge posed by rule-changing innovations.


Back when Sony first introduced Walkman, it changed the society's view towards music. It became more like I am enjoying my music and you keep guessing what it is. iPods took it to next level and it was like forget the music, I look so cool listen to it. iPhones did same in mobile phone arena. So the innovations at times are really more about more to make us egoist people be more egocentric.


Same will happen to Twitter and to every such innovation. Soon they loose focus of the actual purpose and end up being a tool to feed our egos. It's a never ending cycle. If you carefully notice, many twitter clients are not how well we can listen to others. Rather how quickly we can say what we have to (without bothering if there is anyone caring to listen). Most people follow others so they get followed back and get to show a bigger count. For the same reason, they won't block the spam bots as they inflate their followers count.


As a society we really need some innovations that we make us realize we are humans. We need innovations to teach us manners again. So that, 'compassion' doesn't become a word that we hear only at beauty pageants.






1 comment:

Kiran said...

Ankur,
Interesting thought.
I think Aldous Huxley said it well - http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/75681: "...failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". This illustration is rather interesting too: http://imgur.com/gallery/zP5fa