Twitter, as with all forms of social media, is different. It is not the “latest step in the evolution of mediated communication” in the sense that we used to understand “mediated”. My phone analogy is probably incomplete – because we don’t yet know what Twitter will end up being analagous to. Phone only works at the moment to try and deter people from seeing Twitter (and all forms of social media) as types of content in the same way a newspaper was a type of content shaped by the rules that applied to the form of distribution that was “newspaper”. Twitter just IS content – it is not a type of content.

However, I can’t really see too many phone companies saying “We’ll disconnect you because we don’t like what you’re saying to people that want you to ring them”.

Which is more or less what Twitter said to Dave Winer.

Critically, this doesn’t mean that everyone can now be a broadcaster – it is doing away with the very notion of broadcasting. Twitter is not about sharing information with large numbers of people. Its about sharing information. The “large numbers of people” is a redundant assumption, based on our previous understanding of media, by default, being mass media.

This is where all the people that have a vested interest in “old” media (digital or otherwise) really struggle. Journalists keep waiting for a blog to emerge that looks like an on-line version of a newspaper and reaches the same numbers of people their own on-line offerings reach – in the belief that until this happens, they can’t be threatened. They don’t realise that they are being made irrelevant, they are being replaced by something that looks totally different – not blogs, but blogging. Not by institutions (like newspapers) but by a process. http://richardstacy.com/2009/06/05/andrew-keens-head-and-the-shift-from-institutions-to-processes/

Anyway – enough. You can see the ‘social media revolution’ is my thing! If you want more you can check out http://richardstacy.com/my-articles/

Anyway, this is getting a little childish, for which I apologise. I just don’t see the value in claiming that things are unprecedented and beyond our current language, when it’s far more interesting to view them as latest steps in the evolution of mediated communication.

Social media is interesting in that it blends functions of broadcast/public media with those of person-to-person/private media (although so does the letters page of a newspaper). That someone thought of introducing things like 140-character limits and ‘followers’ is clever, but it’s not an eruption of blinding, absolute novelty.

I suspect the time taken for Twitter (or something Twitterlike) to reach the level of penetration where it becomes – to quote Clay Shirky – technically boring (and therefore socially interesting) is shorter than you suspect.

You made some of the points I was going to make in reply re deliberate misunderstanding and Twitter not being a website.

To further eloborate – I ‘do’ Twitter using Seesmic Desktop (not a web site) and in so far as a have a web address for Twitter I never actually go there.

WWW stands for world-wide-web I believe – not World Wide Website.

Have also thought really hard – still can’t think of any significant characteristic that Twitter has in common with what we currently media – perhaps Will could enlighten us.

http://twitter.com is a website but Twitter is not. It’s both a company and a communication infrastrucure.

Some of the demographic studies of Twitter are definitely interesting to me personally (gives me something to tweet about, at least , but I agree with Richard that they will eventually be irrelevant. I see it taking a long time though – I know a load of people who refused to get a mobile phone for years, or start texting, or emailing, etc. Probably the over 55-year-olds and Conservative voters.

And to say “None of the things that define what we call media are shared by Twitter. Neither are any of the defining charatcteristics of Twitter shared by what we call media” is just absurd. Go on – think really hard, and see if you can think of something they have in common.

I also like ‘twitter is not a website’. How many other forms of ‘infrastructure’ can be accessed with the letters ‘www’ in front of their name?

We don’t yet have the language to describe what Twitter is, in the same way we didn’t have the language to describe the automobile when it first emerged. We described cars in the language of what it was they were replacing – hence we called them horseless carriages. Hence we call Twitter a form of media.