The article was written 5 years ago, and the world of social networking has greatly changed since then. Facebook was born and dominating the global social networking, but guess what, Twitter has probably more than quadrupled its popularity since then, with FAMOUS celebrities and personalities leading the cyber updates and gossips exchanged in the world wide web through the triumphant and just getting bigger that is Twitter. About whom else will millions of people want to know where they shop, what they buy, and what they are thinking AT THAT PRECISE MOMENT?
Twitter might have moved on since then from being just a sixth sense. Serious television programs, not just the gossip programs, use Twitter to communicate with its audience and they, the audience, communicate back in real-time to see their messages impact the show. Serious life-changing groups and organizations utilize Twitter to relay important updates or urgent announcement. And way much better than that, Twitter updates make headlines these days: “ commented about his divorce from in Twitter.”
While some people bash social networking sites about their so-called negative effects to the society, about how one person murdered his girlfriend because of a status message, and so on and so forth, this article is probably the most illuminating article I have read about social networking sites written in a time when they are at pilot-stage, especially the type of networking Twitter introduced. The article was honest, positive, and analytically brilliant. I would like to see someone do it for the Twilight series explaining its huge success despite people's bashing in a lot of respects. In the midst of people complaining about the banality of Twitter, Clive Thompson gave an impressively scientific explanation of Twitter’s “usability” (at that time it may not even be considered important):
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination. (Thompson)
And, as time told the world, he was right.
Work Cited
Thompson, Clive. "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense." Wired Magazine: Issue 15.07. 26 June 2007. Print.
