The Mistaken Assumption of Flutter

"Flutter" is an effective satire of the micro-blogging fad because it highlights the ridiculousness of twitter through exaggeration (or reduction, depending on how one looks at it). Why must we know the minute details of peoples' lives? What is private? Why are people too lazy to communicate in full sentences about their daily lives? The video attempted to answer these questions with a statement communicated through their mockumentary--their point being that we are traveling down a slippery slope towards a world without privacy and without communication as we know it today.

In particular, the flutter video mocks the way that people write updates to alert people that they, for example, are going to the bathroom, and that people have limits to the size of their communications. Their gripes are spot on--it has become ridiculous the way that people have ruined our concept of conversation and have divulged details of their lives that no one really cares to know. But many people find it enjoyable to chat in such a manner, and who is it to judge whether twitter is really a good and pure form of communication? The makers of the video assume a number of things about twitter which I find incorrect--first, they make twitter seem like a form of communication and not a form of self expression. I don't think that most twitterers tweet to communicate on an individual level with their followers, they tweet because they want to broadcast information about their daily lives. Thus, implementing character limits does not really affect conversation and human interaction--rather, it affects how we broadcast and present ourselves. And as for privacy, who are the makers of the video to determine what is private to some people and not private to others? People are free to tweet what they want when they want--and others are by no means required to follow their feeds. So who cares if someone tweets about going to the bathroom for instance--if the tweeter doesn't mind, and the follower has the option to leave?

I think that there are obvious drawbacks to twitter and micro-blogging in general, which the flutter video identified very effectively. But I also think there is value in understanding the motives for people to micro-blog--and saying that interpersonal conversation is a casualty of twitter is a misunderstanding of the essence of tweeting--self expression.