Of all Media, Tweets Best Reflect Consciousness

I first thought Twitter was interesting when I realized it was basically a stream of consciousness.  The costs of posting to Twitter are very low, so consequently, people post fairly frequently and about whatever is on their mind.  It doesn’t need to be about anything in particular.  You also aren’t costing your audience too much.  The cost of reading a tweet are nearly negligible…unless of course you’re blasting tweets at people (don’t do that)….

As you move up the chain to more “costly” forms of media (blogs, essays, books), things take more time and have to be more coherent. If you have to put a non-negligible amount of time into something, you feel like it needs to be good and polished.

You can learn a lot about someone through their blog, but I’d say in general blogs are a subset of that person’s consciousness.  The topics are either more important to them personally (thus providing the motivation to write more than a few characters about them), or the writer thinks they’re more important to their audience.  If you read a few 500 word blog posts that offer nothing interesting, you’ll soon spend your time elsewhere, so a blogger that is trying to deliver to an audience has to keep his audience in mind. (which could mean that a blog is also a reflection of the audience/community’s consciousness…..)

The next level up is essays and articles.  They’re more about topics.  Writing an essay takes too much time for it to reflect consciousness. (Although, they can still reflect the author’s interests.)

An author is lucky if you spend the time to even pick up a traditional, text-based book these days.  But these are even further removed from consciousness.  Any artifacts of consciousness left from an effusive burst of thought are usually edited to maintain consistency.

Moment to moment, we’re flickers of thought.  We can focus these flickers of thought in order to deliver more complex ideas and analysis, but this requires energy.  It isn’t our basal state. This makes Twitter quite interesting;  of all forms of media, tweets are the best representation of consciousness and the raw human experience.

-Kevin
4.17.2010