|
|
Here in part 2 of my comments on the intercom article on Twitter as a tool for technical communicators, I will elaborate on Twitter as a conversational tool. My point in this post is that Twitter, like a conversation, has a perfect democracy of information. And I will explain two reasons this is not good for technical communication.
The democratization of information can be wonderful—open source software takes the monopoly on functionality away from companies, Wikipedia puts the responsibility of accuracy and objectivity upon the entire community, and online forums provide some of the most helpful sources of expertise for archaic subjects—but this quote also raises an important point. The Nth degree in any context is can be scary; it can be pretty big. And this is Twitter’s biggest, and probably most unresolvable problem: a billion users tweeting in 140 character bursts across the globe in an unstructured format. There is too much information on Twitter, combined with too much nonsense, for the average user to make any sense of. It reminds me of a Borges short story, The Library of Babel, where the entire universe is composed of hexagonal rooms in an immense multi-story honeycomb. Each wall has racks of books filled with random strings of characters. The people who live in the rooms reason that if they move from room to room long enough, reading as they go, they could ascertain the entirety of knowledge. The only problem is that there is no organization and not enough time to sort it all out. More to the point, the democratization of information is also something that technical communication attempts to avoid. A technical communicator takes information from experts to transmit it to lay people. Wikipedia is a failed attempt to create complete democratization of information; locked articles on polarizing subjects, articles flagged as subjective, these are reasons Wikipedia limits the democracy its users are allowed to practice. The people at the recent tea parties holding signs reading, “Government, get your hands off of my Medicare,” are allowed and encouraged to edit articles on health care reform in a perfect democracy. This is why technical communicators are around—they advocate for both the readers and the distributors of information. They are the enlightened despots of information, the reason every piece of information doesn’t need to be taken with a grain of salt. The author of the article is correct that Twitter is a tool for the democratization of information. But Twitter is a tool of immediacy, of conversation. And to bring us full circle, like a conversation, Twitter is ephemeral; once tweeted, your 140 characters join the billions of other tweets. And because democracy means truth and falsehood to coexist with the responsibility to sort it out resting on the reader, if Twitter ever becomes a tool for the storage and transmission of information, technical communicators, and the rest of the world, will be in serious trouble. |