Week 6 - Twitter, is it really that bad?

Ever since I first heard of the internet, I've heard how spectacular it is and how it will forever change our lives. I still hear that talk, nearly 13 years later. Instead of the internet in general, it's the types of websites we visit and the way we visit those sites that is going to "forever change our lives." Twitter is one of those sites that has been accused of killing journalism, shortening our attention spans, and ruining our grammar. If it supposedly causes all those bad things, what is so great about it that keeps everyone hooked? Personally, I couldn't tell ya. I've also heard bad things about Facebook, but that doesn't keep me away from there. However, I think that Facebook has so much more to offer than Twitter does. Facebook is more interactive--it's like an online community. Twitter just has short updates of people talking about themselves. Who really cares? I admit I started following a few celebs on Twitter because it was kind of cool to see what they were doing when they weren't busy doing famous stuff (although I don't think it's cool to know what everyone, including my nonfamous friends, is doing at every second of the day). I started following Miley Cyrus, not because I'm a fan of her, but because I kept hearing about her controversial tweets. Now, her tweets fills up my entire homepage and I barely even read them anymore.

Going back to the bad parts of Twitter, one article mentioned that it was speculated that Twitter was killing off journalism. There would be no need for professional journalists anymore since everyone had a Twitter account. Why? Well, the article mentioned the idea of a man named Janis Krums who sent a photo and a tweet to his Twitter account about the Hudson river plane crash. The news is almost instant these days; reporters are on a scene in minutes to get a short story to add to their news website. Well, with people tweeting the news, is there really a need for journalism? Fortunately, Cmswire.com says there is. Cmswire.com noted that TechCrunch journalist Paul Carr said this: “While bloggers can own the first five minutes of any breaking story - a plane crash, a fire, a burglary - it’s always going to be the professional reporters who own the next five days, or five weeks.” Plus, you know, the journalists are the ones who are going to report the facts, and they're going to report them professionally.

As some might already know, our short attention spans (average seven minutes) can be linked to television. Now, it's been predicted that Twitter, along with MySpace and Facebook, might shorten our attention spans even more. Baroness Susan Greenfield is worried that "these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and live for the moment." Greenfield's proposition doesn't seem too far out there to me. As I'm writing this blog I have five tabs open, plus I am chatting on MSN. Is my multitasking helping me or harming me in the long run? Will my attention span drop significantly if I continue to use the internet in the manner that I do? I am not on one website for longer than a few minutes. What do you all think? Is this where sites like Twitter are leading us?