Clearly, Patrick Marshall is someone who is critiquing the shadows on the wall. As if the I-have-never-tried-Twitter subtext wasn’t enough, Marshall closes his GCN Insider column with:
That’s in contrast to new communications technologies such as voice mail and e-mail. Both technologies have made huge changes in the ways people communicate with one another and have brought clear benefits to both our work and personal lives. Those benefits have given those technologies some degree of staying power. As for blogs, the jury is still out. Some of us are skeptical about blogs, at least as journalistic tools, but others have jumped into them with abandon. We’ll see.
Given that the new communication technologies of email (1965) and voice mail (1979) are so influential in changing people’s lives, I wonder where the World Wide Web (1992) stands in Marshall’s view of IT history? But then again, it is only two years older than blogging, so the jury is still out.
This is the perspective from “the leading provider of integrated information and media for the government information technology market?”
2 Comments
Not terribly incisive. Even if you don’t like Twitter very much, it seems remiss to not even touch on the phenomenon of nano-blogging/CPA (what’s the current jargon-du-jour?) that Twitter’s emblematic of. What’s interesting about Twitter et al for me is that they represent the closest picture yet of what a web might feel like where there is no distinction between desktop and mobile, and the scale of mobile interations - 5 billion texts a month in the UK - moved into a yet more socially enabled environment could start to get very interesting.
I agree. This very simple idea has a way of interacting in multiple channels in a manner other tools cannot, due to inherent constraints. It works for me because it comes into my life, rather than forces me to go to Twitter. And if my life suddenly changes to one where I mostly use a mobile device, it can make that shift. Very powerful, especially for a service that is only about a year old.
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