Twitter’s Efficacy in Aiding Social Transformation

I talked last week about how Twitter makes life on the Internet easier. You can customize your allegiance to certain products, celebrities, and even people in your real-life, carbon-based social network. This week I’ll be a little more specific and talk about how Twitter makes social transformation, big and small, easier than ever before. In this article I’ll focus on how Twitter makes it easier to be funny and how in turn humor can lead to social change.

Twitter is easily translatable into the language of irony: brief, content heavy statements meant for immediate impact and in some cases prolonged relevance. For example, a particularly cogent tweet could, in another context, be a powerful bit of dialogue in a movie, comedy or otherwise. If you’re a stand up, you no longer have to “grind it out” on the underground circuit for years hoping that the big break will come your way.

There are a thousand potential George Carlin’s and Bill Cosby’s out there waiting to be heard who may not have ready access to a comedy club where they can test out material. Twitter in this case serves as the intermediary that open mics and road gigs used to be by necessity. Used effectively, one can acquire a sizable fan base through consistent activity on Twitter and other sites like it, as well through a process of shrewd and comprehensive personal branding.

I say this because it is also much easier to cultivate an audience of like-minded people than ever before. We don’t live in an age where artistic viability is judged solely on how broadly appealing one is, whether that’s in their comedy, or any art form they choose to practice. That is not to say of course that we should prevent someone from becoming the next John Lennon or James Brown, inspiring people with a timeless message while rocking super hard at the same time, but someone who is trying to make their way in the artistic or pop-cultural game no longer has to look to these monoliths as the only way to make a living and be influential.

Indeed, part of the revolutionary part of Twitter is that everyone can get up and reach an audience almost immediately. As they develop, they develop as a collective instead of in isolation. Being on Twitter, or any other active social networking site, is like the 21st century version of being at a speakeasy, coffee shop, or a hip socialist bookstore in the not-yet-gentrified part of town. You can make a tangible difference on the world without leaving your bedroom.

In short, the action required for social change can take many forms, big and small. With Twitter, and the Internet as a whole, relevant information is effectively organized and instantly accessible to all curious parties. That, combined with the human desire to connect to others, and humor’s power in not only easing social tension but also in speaking truth to power, make Twitter an ideal climate for cultivating both widespread civil disobedience and cathartic, brain-cleansing laughter in equal measure.

- Alex Curtis

An Unusual Twitter Related Service That Turn Tweets Into a Radio Show

The kinds of Twitter-related services that individuals and companies are limited only by the imagination. One of the more unusual ones is provided by Tweetrad.io, a which converts Twitter posts into a kind of radio broadcast. The service ads extras like simulated static between between posts to make it sound like you are changing stations with an old style radio tuning knob.

It isn't a word-for-word translation. URLs are excluded and common Twitter terms get turned into appropriate phrases. The result is somewhat mechanical, and for most not not hard to understand.

While this kind of service can have practical uses, the creators of it may have been looking to develop something that was more entertainment related than business related. You can get a bit of an idea of the attitude of the folks at tweetrad.io by reading what they say about their company.

At tweetrad.io our mission is to index all the world's information; however, unlike google we plan to be really evil in the process. We've started by seeking out the most relevant scholarly data on the web. Naturally Twitter was where we looked first. Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we've made it possible for billions of people to hear the "Pulse of the Planet" as never before.

Rather than describe this service, I invite you to check it out for yourself.

How AirSafe.com Uses Twitter

When I started the aviation safety site AirSafe.com back in 1996, I didn't have a built in audience or any offline publications, so I had to continually evolve how I used the web site and other online resources to find and build an audience. Along the way, one of the key tactics I developed was to look at emerging trends in online communication and to use those that help to serve the AirSafe.com audience.

Twitter was one of those technologies. Once I saw that Twitter was getting some traction and being increasingly adopted by users, I incorporated it into several elements of the AirSafe.com universe. Specifically, whenever I send out a mailing on the opt-in mailing list, that mailing list automatically generates a tweet. I also tie in the two top AirSafe.com-related blogs with my Twitter account, and those also generate tweets for each no entry. Finally, if there is a breaking news item like a plane crash, I typically use Twitter to send out a brief headline and a URL to a web site page or blog post with additional information.

One of the unexpected benefits was that Twitter and related technologies opened up additional options for connecting with the audience. The most direct is the connection opportunities with those who choose to follow AirSafe.com on Twitter. The other is the Twitter search function at search.twitter.com. It is a great tool for quickly finding useful links to breaking news stories. For example, after a plane crash, there are usually hundreds of tweets coming in every minute, and at least a few will have links to news media and other resources that have timely information on an unfolding event.