New Media Revolution?

I’ve always thought of myself as somewhat of an early adopter, but I’ve never been what you might call obsessive about technology.  I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod — just a really old, beat up Blackberry and a cheap mp3.  In fact, I don’t even use the mp3 too much since the only time I really have time to listen to podcasts is in the car, and I’ve always got a Bluetooth in my ear, so the podcasts go on a CD.  I know — that’s old school. But I continue to be fascinated by the advances in communication made possible by the vast array of technological tools we have at our disposal.

It wasn’t too long ago that email and web sites were a new frontier.  Now when I tell my 16-year-old son I’ve sent him an email, he looks at me like I just told him I mailed him a letter by Pony Express or chiseled something on a stone tablet.  If I want to communicate with him online, it had better be on Facebook, or at least on a Facebook chat. It’s amazing how quickly new communication technologies have been developed and adopted, to the point that we now take for granted things we wouldn’t have dreamed of only a few years ago. So I like to try to stay involved and keep learning.

I signed up for a Twitter account about a year ago, but I never did much with it.  Same story with blogs.  Being a professional communicator, sometimes I just have to take time away from the profession and just chill.  I mean, if you are a doctor, you don’t hang around hospitals on nights and weekends, do you?  So I haven’t spent all my free time on social media, to say the least.

But as the phenomenon known as Twitter continued to evolve, I finally decided I needed to figure out what it’s really about.  (At least I beat Oprah to it.)  I went to a friend of mine who is a social media guru for some answers, and he explained that it’s all about joining the conversation, sort of like being in a big room and gravitating toward people who have interesting things to say.  That totally made sense to me.  Now I’m somewhat of a Twitter fanatic, but I’m not what’s called an “evangelist.”  In fact, I don’t really like that word in that context.  It kills the spiritual connotation for me.

My initial impression is that so much of what I’m seeing on Twitter is all about social media and Twitter (i.e., @bigtimesocialmediaguy: I’m at a new media conference and I’m tweeting everything the speaker is saying…).  Either that or what someone had for dinner.  There doesn’t seem to be enough in between.  Either it’s an obsession with Twitter as a marketing tool or it’s people just doing it so they can say they’re doing it.

It sort of reminds me of when I got my first computer back in the early 90s.  I was really excited about having something that would save me a lot of time and help me get organized.  Then, after a while, I realized I was spending a lot of time just maintaining the machine — running defrag, scandisk and virus scans, installing antivirus software, tweaking all kinds of settings to try to make it run better — all focused on the machine instead of what it could do.

I’m starting to wonder if Twitter isn’t a bit like that now.  So much of what I see out there is focused on the medium rather than the message.

What do you think?