Twitter for Douglas?

I have been spending the last few months encouraging (provoking?) a newbie blogger, Doug Hammerstrom by correcting many of the misconceptions contained in his posts with his initial foray into the blogging community at It's Not About Me. Now I will say that this really is not new. For over 30 years in dorm rooms, over pints of various kinds of beer, in long train rides, car rides, VW micro bus rides, on freezing mountain hillsides, in long letters and late night phone calls, the subjects may change but context has stayed about the same. Blogging just puts his foolishness in a public forum and it is just a too irresistible target for me. He is doing quite well as a new blogger, if you enjoy reading the well thought out musings of a iconoclastic, conservative, fundamental Christian, environmentally committed, well respected physician. From such a solid base you would think he would not get it wrong so much of the time.

Recently I told him that he was probably ready to take the next step and move on to microblogging with Twitter. His reaction - "that's just for folks who don't want to think". So, despite his lumping Twitter into the world of IM speak, text messaging and cell phone gabbers and his chronic dismissal of popular culture and the hoi polli as a whole (you have to forgive him as sometimes his nose gets so far up in the air he does not realize how far up his butt his head really is) it gave me pause.

Twitter does make me think. Or rather the network that it connects me to makes me think. I started like Doug. I blogged first because my daughter was blogging. My first efforts let me see the power of networking as I quickly found a group of folks connected by biking and outdoor activities and gave me a peek into the ways teens were expressing themselves online. Those steps lead me to reading blogs of people in my professional area, and Twitter has provided a logarithmic expansion of resources, ideas, people and culture. Twitter makes me go new places, it makes me read and reflect, it exposes me to people who think like me and those that don't. It is largely about K-12 education for me, but I am fascinated with the ways that "wisdom of the crowds" is being mined by Twitter derivatives and how the fast moving online culture is becoming a mainstream flow of information. From Obama tweets, to hastags about Mubai, to CNN & PBS moving into Twitter space, it is worth knowing and worth knowing about.

I find some common ground with Doug and some of the "old lions" of the K-12 ed community that are finding a surge toward Twitter is decreasing the use of blogging for expression of ideas and reflection on educational issues. In the "old" days when we just had blogs, the time and attention it took to write a few paragraphs created more thoughtful posts. You got to "know" the person by reading their blogposts. Nowadays if you can't stick it in a 140 characters including a shortened URL, it does not get noticed,and nobody checks out the blog where the longer post resides.

I do think about that piece a lot. We flit from topic to topic. We chase the latest thing like Twitter birds on the info tree. Is there less deep reflective thought? Are we and the kids we teach becoming a society of thin veneer where we know lots and think we know much but do not think deeply and thus really don't know jack? Is that where we are headed? A society of folks who because of instant access know much but know little? And yet I like the different kid of "knowing" when one of my favorite bloggers tweets the mundane factoid that they just took their kids to Madagascar2 and really enjoyed it, or that This Week in Tech is going live in a few minutes.

On balance I do know that understanding Twitter and how social networks are formed through new media is important in understanding society and especially youth culture today. The question on the table is why would it be important for a 53 year old physician, devoted father of 3, marginally adequate husband who habitually under appreciates his saint of a wife, church elder, politically conservative environmentalist, hunter, living in the last spec of red left in Colorado need to join Twitter? I have found two posts that I hope will lead him astray:

http://casesblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/doctors-opinion-why-i-started.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/why-i-like-twitter.html

I am hoping that some folks who have wandered over to my personal reflections blog from my tweeting might be able to provide him with more reasons why he should join Twitter by posting responses to this blog post.

Oh, and Douglas, - the Twitter handle - DaHammer is taken but NotAboutMe is not. Act fast and sign up for an account!