Wondering about how we lose touch with what everyone else seems to be talking about. At some point I stopped caring about popular music, for example. I listen to it on the radio now when the kids are in the car. But I don’t care about it like they do. I stopped paying attention to it when I got busy doing other stuff. Like everything else. John Prine’s on the Pandora Radio right now. He’s not pop, though, is he? Another example: I never saw a single episode of Friends until it was out of production. Lots of stuff is like that. I live in a cultural cul-de-sac.

I’m thinking about this because there’s been some blog chatter lately about Twitter. Graham Wegner and Will Richardson, for example. Some people are blaming Twitter for interfering with their blogging, which seems a bit strange. People start communicating through a channel that allows only short bursts of text, and they feel conflicted about not being more reflective. Then they write about that on their blogs. And I end up reading it and thinking about how twisted things can get. But that’s OK. ‘Twisted’ is lots of things I like.

Of course, there is the positive side. Chris Lott made the pro Twitter case several months ago asking,

Wasn’t it just a few years ago that blogs were being singled out because they were too ephemeral and constant complaints being aired about the lack of thought that went into such easy publishing? And before that wasn’t it the death of the essay and long form news? What about epic poems? Where is our Homer (and I don’t mean Homer Simpson)?

More recently, Chris published a link to Twitter Collaboration Stories, so we can maybe see a few new possibilities for this environment. I say, Ok, maybe Twitter isn’t “robbing blogs of their vigor.” I can see that it taps into an alternative semantic environment, and it’s better suited for some purposes than others. I get that. Tom Hoffman shared this post yesterday that compared Twitter with IRC. That was helpful since I’ve had just a tiny bit of exposure to IRC.

Guy Kawasaki says that Twitter made his website better, but that’s neither here nor there for me.

I was thinking about whether Twitter would be something that I’d want to look into, and what might happen if I did. Mostly, it didn’t look like anything I wanted to get close to. And then, this comment from Stephen Downes on Tom Hoffman’s post helped put the idea to rest. Downes said…

….My issue with Twitter is a bit different. I could not subscribe to anything like a reasonable number of Twitter feeds.

It would mean that I have to select some people to listen to and others to ignore completely. Twitter chatter really would be unintelligeble taken all out of context. Especially when people are commenting to people I don’t read.

Twitter creates group behaviour. It creates boundaries. It creates cliques.

I can’t afford to lock my attention to one group rather than to the wider network. So I can’t focus my attention on Twitter - I stay focused on the wider blogosphere and the web, however imperfectly.

The problem of limited capacity for attention is a regular issue for me in an elementary school classroom. But it isn’t just an auditory thing. Distractions of any kind require the ability to set something aside so that other (maybe temporarily) important things get done. I like to read and write as an escape from the classroom noise. Friends and connections are great, but they aren’t my focus. The family gets all that.

I’m going to let Twitter pass. I already don’t listen to podcasts or watch videos very much because they take too long to download, and the few I’ve heard are mostly not worth the wait.

I guess this is how we get to be sticks-in-the-mud. One technology at a time.