Gregor Hochmuth Misses The Mark With The ‘Power Of Audience’

Gregor has attempted to analyze the success of Twitter using old media imaginings, and largely fails to capture what is happening:

[from Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience]

[…]

The answer lies in understanding Audience.

Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.

I think the metaphor of an Audience — which implies passive observation by the many of the active participation of the few — is totally wrong, even though activity in Twitter is distributed unequally. Jay Rosen’s coinage — “the people formerly known as the audience” — is meant to be emblematic of the tectonic shifts in social media.

Twitter is much more like a cocktail party, where people alternate speaking and listening, in open conversations in which some or many of those listening are not saying anything at the moment. This allows sparkling conversationalists to hold court, for curmudgeons to nit pick and make ironic comments sotto voce, and for arguments to break out, all in different rooms at the party.

And Twitterers who have no followers are in exactly the same situation as bloggers with no readers. However, there may be a real distinction between blogging-with-readers and twittering-with-followers, but that depends on the style of the blogger. My sort of blogging is more like writing essays, while others write shorter, more personal posts. So I think of it as a continuum, with twittering and tumbler-blogging at one end and /Message and The Huffington Post at the other.

But the notion that Twitter somehow provides a canned ‘Audience’ willing to consume tweets really misses what’s going on. If you change the term to ‘community’ or even ‘cocktail party’ you’d come much closer.