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I love Twitter, but a lot of people I know who are Twitter users are often baffled by the small number of people I follow. I’ve never had a good or consistent answer to people’s enquiries into my lack of connections. But, today, as I realised how unmanageable my saved searches on Twitter are getting, a simple answer dawned on me: I don’t follow people, I follow hashtags.

I love reading tweets about books or fiction. I don’t have many favoured authors on Twitter, partly because I don’t have many favoured authors! But a lot of authors and publishers on Twitter seem to be mostly engaged in industry networking, advertising or personal updates, none of which I’m terribly interested in. Thankfully #books, #literature and #fiction provide a more interesting and diverse stream of chatter about literature and, usually, from within those feeds I occasionally find a hashtag or two that piques my interest for a while. Having said this, Readings Books and Penguin Books generally provide interesting updates, with the latter being more Twitter-friendly by using hashtags regularly. Still, I don’t follow them. In any case, my need to discuss books and fiction (more specifically) is appropriately satisfied already by Goodreads.

It’s a different story with music. The #jazz hashtag is boring and inundated with ads or discussions of the Utah Jazz NBA basketball team. There are so few jazz musicians on Twitter. Most jazz musicians who have Twitter accounts (see here for a good list of American artists) look as though they are updated solely by their PR people (yes, I’m talking to you Branford Marsalis!). Either that or they are telling me about gigs in far away places that I can’t get to and so end up feeling depressed. I follow Vijay Iyer because he tweets a lot about jazz music as much as he tweets about his own and he’s like a jazz intellectual. Oh, and he’s a freakin’ musical genius! Labels are prominent, but then most of their tweets are about selling you albums – no real discussions going on or stemming from their tweets, just advertisements. Generally, Twitter is a bit of an abyss for jazz music lovers. Mind you I follow APassion4Jazz which does a really good job digesting jazz tweets. And I love the jazz quotes!

You’ll probably notice that with neither music or literature have I made mention of critics. Well, they’re on there, but if I’m going to read or listen to what a critic is saying I won’t be restricting myself to 140 characters. Plus, I’m mostly interested in interacting with other average lit and jazz fans like myself. But as I said there’s not much discussion going on.

Prominent Indigenous lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt has shut down her Twitter account after media attention grew over her controversial remarks about the appearance of central Australian Indigenous woman, Bess Price, on Q&A. What's interesting, if you have a look at the conversation Behrendt had joined when she made the remarks, was that it tended to blur and obscure the boundaries between a familiar, private discussion and an impersonal, public one. New technology clearly changes existing forms of interaction in a way that can have adverse consequences if you are not aware of the risks. But, I would say that these risks are easily understood by looking at the offline norms of public discussion. Maybe the technology obscures the operation of these norms and the novelty of innovative modes of interaction seems to capture people's attention rather than the age old and conventional ideas behind them - i.e. the agora, the public forum.

And the thing that seems to most undermine what I like about Twitter is the cult of personality it also encourages – social media can sometimes turn into a bastardised game of celebrity status. Social networks are organised along properties such as trust and reputation, all of which are quickly reduced to mere popularity, personality traits or simplified markers of a certain point of view. Not that popularity determines what I’m interested in, but I’d rather follow a popular hashtag/discussion than a popular person. Like a public forum, I’m not going to listen to someone because of who they are but because of what they say. I say this not to ignore who someone is, but to emphasise what they say as having more public importance. And, in the end, what someone says in public should be informed by who they are. Sometimes it worries me that the term social media is used as a proxy for the idea of a online public fora. The reason being because it implies you have to have some sort of tangible/digital ‘connection’ with someone to talk to them. Why should I limit myself to people with whom I have a connection? What about spontaneous discussion amongst fellow human beings? Twitter is uniquely positioned to offer this. And this is why I don’t like the idea of or use the function to make my Twitter feed private. In many ways, FB does this whole idea of personal and private connections a lot better. It’s also why I think there are a lot of discussions about privacy and FB – there are expectations that FB is about my personal community. The pattern of my complaints are hopefully showing you what the crux of the problem is for me: I see Twitter as a public forum that is potentially being undermined because people seem to think that the ‘social’ in ‘social media’ equates to ‘personality’.

But this little philosophy of mine is a real dilemma sometimes.

I’ll admit that I’m not really immune to the pull of personalities. As I pointed out, there’s very little interesting discussion on #jazz so I tend to follow a couple of interesting jazz musicians. But there are many more ‘celebrities’ or public figures I find interesting but I can’t bring myself to follow them on Twitter. For example, Stephen Fry is such an intelligent, witty and interesting person, but I really do not want to follow him because I’m not interested in 99% of what he says because it’s of a mostly personal nature (and by that I mean about his person, rather than what is private). The problem is that I’m interested more about what he has to say about things other than himself and Twitter is certainly not the outlet he uses for that. So, the traditional principles of social networking haven’t worked out for me here and so it ended up being a little disappointing when I followed him at first.

But, then you have absolute gems like Mark Colvin – a one man Twitter news feed aggregator and filter. There’s no doubt the old principles of social networking apply here since he is trusted and reputable offline as a journalist for the ABC on PM and has now established that (on different terms) online. And I’m sure that Mark has won followers who, unlike me, have not relied upon their offline sense of trust and reputation. And it’s not like Mark completely avoids personal tweets. It’s just that his Twitter updates are balanced by consistently informative tweets and retweets. And a lot of what seems to pass as news on Twitter (especially via #auspol) feels more like gossip.

Not that I like to use Twitter for getting my news. I prefer my news to be thoughtfully considered and presented in a way that is the staple of conventional media. There are tons of journalists on Twitter and, frankly, it transforms them into stenographers rather than journalists. So I tend to use RSS aggregators for my news (like Google Reader). Having said this, I’m grateful that there are many journalists on Twitter updating us with breaking news.¹ The QLD floods, the Japan Earthquake, the Jasmine Revolutions were all made more accessible from the on-the-ground tweets from many journalists. This is when you need that sort of attentiveness and efficiency of a stenographer (balanced as always, I would hope, by could editorial judgement). But the hashtags for these events can get unwieldy and end up being useless or less useful. This is mostly because they end up being inundated by retweets and other repetitive tweets. So certain popular hashtags stop functioning in a way that I find useful.

Thankfully there are many journalists and media organisations on Twitter who make public lists of reliable and informative tweeters for certain events and so I often end up following these lists for a while instead of following the journalists themselves or the relevant hashtags. But, then, doesn’t waiting for traditional media to digest information for us undermine the rawness and immediacy of Twitter? I’m also becoming increasingly aware of and fascinated by how useful Twitter is for the gathering of news. But, I’m not convinced it’s any better (or worse, for that matter) than conventional media for consuming news. Again, I’m quite content to rely on trusted media organisations and I’m not sure Twitter necessarily adds much to their arsenal beyond a greater capacity for news gathering.

The point is that I’m not directly following certain people, but am connected to many more through hashtags – why limit myself to only those people I’m following when I’m more directly interested in the topics of discussion than the people themselves? And why is it important to be interested in people in this way, rather than treating like the strangers that they actually are? But, I suppose that in the end, you are reading the rant of a hypocrite: a lazy and infrequent Twitter user who is actually guilty of many of the things I don’t like about Twitter (e.g. advertising these blog posts or personal updates); I praise hashtags as the mode of use for Twitter yet readily employ connections and lists; I critcise the use of Twitter for news but am continually turning to it during breaking events. That there are things on Twitter I don’t really like is not a reason for me to deny or reject it or to throw the Twitter baby out with the social media bath water. On the contrary, I think Twitter’s virtue is that it is so flexible and has such different facets to it that a dinosaur like me can get a lot out of it. I just don’t agree with the way the hype describes what Twitter offers and I’m worried that the cult of personality and connection on Twitter will undermine its vitality and dynamism as an extension and reinvention of the public forum and, therefore, real social change.

1. This should also be read to imply my disappointment with ABC’s News 24. [↩]