It was Twitter’s 7th Birthday this week,
a milestone for a company that I was convinced would never hit the mainstream. Twitter
was created in March 2006 (I heard about it some point in 2007), and although
the exact date that I came across it alludes me, my response to its existence does
not. It’s Ridiculous. No one will use it.
It will be a fad at best. Evidently I was wrong... very wrong. However, I
stand by the response I made back then and despite what I know now I still
maintain that based on my understanding of the world back in 2007, Twitter was not
meant to profoundly affect our lives.
It’s very easy to think that how things are now are how they have always been. In my lifetime I have experienced life without a mobile phone, a desktop computer and an internet connection, yet in the absence of each of these things ever coming into existence life went on. If you asked me now whether I could live without any of these things, the answer would most certainly be no. It’s only once we have had a taste of the future do we realise that we were living in the past.
I was 13 when I received my first phone, and I loved it, not because it represented the commencement of a technological revolution which would culminate in the ubiquitous smartphone, but rather because it would enable me to text girls. The idea that the phone represented something bigger was beyond my comprehension as I was limited by my finite knowledge of what such a product could eventually do. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and thus to have loved my phone for another reason than because it made calls and could text would have been absurd. If on my 13th birthday I had received an iPad (albeit technologically impossible) instead of the phone, I would have sold it in order to get the phone. Why? Because the world was not ready for the iPad and I would have derived no benefit or enjoyment from it. There would have been no content, no ecosystem, no developers; no nothing – just a metallic square. So if you had told me that this device would change the world, I would have disagreed, not because it was an amazing piece of technology, but because we hadn’t yet worked out how it would fit and add value to our lives. And this how I saw Twitter... Yes the premise was innovative and in theory its reach could be extensive, but there wasn’t the social infrastructure to support it. Remember, this was a time when the internet and apps were not delivering rich integrated real-time content to us on multiple devices, and although we thought we were living in a time when everything was instant the truth was that we were not. We thought we were running, when in reality we had just learnt to crawl. I felt that the world wasn’t ready for Twitter because the world had never (en masse) envisaged a situation where one person could speak to the world; and even more amazingly, where the world could then respond.
The evolution of Twitter from an application that
limited your communications to 140 characters to a service that has changed the
world did not arise simply because more people downloaded it; it was because
more people began to imagine what they could to with it. It represented a
global collective awaking. No matter whether you are a marketer, a reporter or
an activist, Twitter fundamentally changed the way you lived and interacted. However,
like a knife that can be used by a surgeon to save a life or a criminal to take
one, the power of Twitter rests with its users.
The 2010 Arab Spring saw millions of people who had been historically silenced,
discriminated against and betrayed receive a voice which they were told they
never had and did not deserve. The individual became part of the collective and
like water rushing towards the ridge of a dam, the power of a shared vision caused
cracks to form in what had been the established way of life for centuries. Yet
just as easily as Twitter was used to help bring about a seismic shift in Arab
governance, it was used to bring about devastation to one of the world’s greatest
cities. The London Riots of 2011 brought scenes from Hollywood to the Streets
of Hacky, and Twitter (along with BBM) was the fuel which allowed the fire to
spread in a way that was unpredictable, uncontrollable and to many Londoners,
unthinkable. London’s misguided youth used the service to boast of their
ill-gotten gains whilst using it to group together disparate rioters into a
single coalesced force that initially could not be tamed. The world watched as
the young waged war and the old struggled to keep up. The pace was frightening.
The consequences were devastating. And the lessons were humbling.
Thus instead of Twitter dying a lonely death a few
years after its launch, it has become ingrained in the social fabric of our
lives. It is one of the world’s most powerful tools as it deals with its most
valuation currency; information, and unlike the rest of the world’s valuable
commodities this resource cannot be bought, stolen or restricted. Before we
never new that it existed, but now that it has been discovered, it is free and
unlimited for all. Twitter is here to stay and will continue to shape the way
we communicate. In this vain, one should not assess new technologies based upon
what it can do today, but by envisaging it’s potential based on what it might
be able to do tomorrow.
Enjoy. Comment. Share :)
