In October 2007 I wrote a short bit about how using Twitter detracts from one’s “real” life. In short, I was wrong; at the time I had barely tried Twitter, I knew nobody using the service and I drew artificial line between my online and offline lives; but by now I use the tool daily to access and connect with people and information online and offline.

The continued convergence of our online and offline lives into one single “real” life points out an enormous opportunity; web-enabled tools can help us capture and structure the data we created through our offline lives to help us understand and change our behavior. Realtime data about our “real lives” will shape real decisions.

October 2007, me, On Twitter: How using Twitter detracts from being social:

I tested twitter this past weekend in SF. Having been staunchly against using it, and without any of my friends using it, there never seemed to be the need to use it.

But since I love to test things out, I decided to give it a whirl.

In short, I still don’t care for it.

How I was wrong.

Why? Using Twitter, shooting short notes into the void, detracts from just enjoying the moment, from enjoying the face-to-face interaction, to enjoying the world in front of your eyes. Why do we feel the need to always connect to the network? Can we exist offline anymore? Am I just hopelessly out-of-touch?

… Perhaps my negative viewpoint is caused by the low utility the service offers to me: since none of my friends use it, I only contribute to the cacophony of ideas chucked into the void, without getting any feedback.

Suffice it to say, times have changed. I was wrong; I hadn’t learn how to use Twitter, I hadn’t engaged with other people using Twitter, I hadn’t paid attention to the community and modes of conversation.

But my main contention to using Twitter is that it detracts from being social. Instead of just enjoying it in the moment, we are thinking of what we saw and how we can interpret it in a 140-character note.

… A bit of our mind is thinking about the void, and less of it is focusing on the moment, the people in front of us, and it just shows a bit of disrespect to who we are with to be distracted by the void.

This thinking reflects a shortsighted focus on just one use case; I was only considering using Twitter as a status update (to a faceless, non-existent audience, talking to “nobody and everybody”) rather than a communication tool; granted many of the applications and interfaces to Twitter were not available, but the basic ability to find, follow and communicate with people was right there, and I missed it by not paying attention, failing to explore and rushing to judgement.

Why I was right.

By constantly sharing little thoughts with others, we are taken out of the moment, and fail to piece together these micro-chunks of thought into cohesive, weighty ruminations that span multiple experiences.

… technology is changing the way we converse, share, even think, and not all for the better. Only by working to understand how it is changing how we interact can we truly leverage the new potential. I still have hope. We’re still in the beginning.

A year-and-a-half later, and we’re still just beginning.

Our conversations have indeed become more fractured, our communications shorter, our thoughts scattered, our minds challenged by multi-tasking, our attention challenged by the incessant beeps, vibrations, blinking lights and pop-up reminders of our multiplicative communication tools; our asynchronous tools and processes are being challenged by the increasing availability and use of realtime data.

But that’s nothing new, of course; we’re just continuing to slide down the scale in the same way since we first learned to communicate and exchange information.

Our strategies have yet to catch up to our tools; even as we spend an inordinate amount of time “talking about talking”, we’ve spent little time thinking about how the tools change our lives, online and offline.

Why this is important.
The one recurring theme: all of our tools and for communicating and organizing people have changed over time. To think that how we use Twitter right now is how we will always use Twitter is to neglect the lessons of history, the Internet, the shifting nature of communication and basic, fundamental human needs.

Instead of focusing on what technology does, let’s focus on how it can be used; how will technology change our behavior? What incentives do new technologies create, reinforce or eliminate? What’s the biggest user needs? Yes, we spend more of our time online, but we still exist in a physical offline environment; how can we use online tools to improve our offline lives?

The real opportunity: structuring the offline data created through our online and offline lives by capturing, storing, aggregating, filtering, threading, analyzing, sharing, promoting and getting relevant, personalized feedback.

Realtime data about our “real lives” will shape real decisions.

That is something I can get excited about.

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Unrelated: How would you explain the web to Thomas Jefferson?