Project 365: Day 85

Day 85, originally uploaded by shalimargonzales.

It's so great to have a great digital camera in my hand. Seriously, all you need to do is point this thing at any subject and BAM, instant art. I tweeted some of the photos I took and I'm pleasantly surprised my the feedback and reactions. Maybe I should resume my photography hobby AND spend more time on twitter (positive reinforcement is AWESOME!)

I was against Twitter the first time I heard about it. It was year, maybe two years ago, and Alex and I were having one of our 10:00am catch-up breakfasts in which he lectures me about how to get more traffic for my original website (whitepeoplemusic.org RIP), I lecture him about how to properly date, and neither of us really listens. Joining Twitter was his reco of the day. Join as WhitePeopleMusic, he told me, and tweet snippets from your blog posts or other thoughts you have that are relevant to what you write.

It am not great at a lot of things (saving money, dressing up, expressing heartfelt affection without a follow-up joke) but I am terrible at a select few thing, and being an early adopter to new technology is one of them (the other ones are math, science, and disguising my reaction to things I find rude). So it wasn't so much that I didn't appreciate the idea of Twitter, it was more that I couldn't figure out how to use it. Yes, I now know that it's a Facebook wall with a 140 character limit, but at the time it was very overwhelming slash hard to read.

To say that Twitter is huge would be boring - it is, in the finally appropriate words of Rachel Zoe, "everything" - which is why I was surprised to hear Malcolm Gladwell - the man who first wrote about how something becomes so "everything" - come out so strongly against Twitter as a form of social change in his recent New Yorker article - Social Change: why the revolution will not be tweeted. (Yes, Shira, that shout out was for you)

I get his point - Twitter makes us lazy activists willing to throw 140 character support at any cause we have 30 seconds to re-tweet. Can Twitter really organize us, really move the social needle on anything from US policy reform to Iranian elections? I don't know. I've never thought about Twitter that way, and I'd venture to guess that neither have you.

Twitter is, above all, about self promotion. Whether your self is telling your 20 followers that the party you're at is bumpin' or that some comedian is hysterical or - more likely - that you're hysterical.

Can something so intentionally selfish ever motivate people in a new direction?

Twitter founder Biz Stone thinks so. He came out against Gladwell in a piece for The Atlantic. He points to all sorts of research proving the impact of Twitter - its use in charity fundraising, political organizing, and the like.

"Small Change" dismisses leaderless, self-organizing systems as viable agents of change. A flock of birds flying around an object in flight has no leader yet this beautiful, seemingly choreographed movement is the very embodiment of change. Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one--suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal. Lowering the barrier to activism doesn't weaken humanity, it brings us together and it makes us stronger."

I agree with both writers on the issue. Major social change the likes of the Civil Rights Movement will not be organized on Twitter, but at this point it will not go down without it.

So, what do you think?