Design Culture

I Love Twitter, or, the continual self-effacement of Generation X

When it comes to Twitter, the rule is don’t talk about yourself too much. You can talk about what you are doing or talk about something you like but comments like these aren’t really about you, they are about an activity or a person, place, or thing outside of you, something that interests you that might also interest other people. The implicit assumption seems to be that Twitter readers are interested in things that are interesting— not in the people that these things interest. Twitter is an organic, voluntary and vast targeted — and traceable — marketing survey.

And that’s ok.

What interests me about this interest in interest is that it obscures a quirk in generational psychology. The Xer’s that use Twitter — and it is Xer’s that use Twitter more than anyone else — have a real reluctance to self-assertion in other spheres of social life. They are the George Harrison of generations caught between the brash Boomers and the earnest Millennials.

Xer’s mask their self-assertion in irony or in head down, hard work. But in Twitter they have found a voice: a soft technology whose ethos has emerged out of their psychological need to speak without being seen. Twitter may be the future of democracy or of the news or of any number of other things, as its aficionado’s claim, but it remains a technology whose use — and ethics, and politics — will be shaped by the psychological needs of its users.

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© 2010 k. kanan design news and commentary.