When it came into being in 2006, Twitter seemed perplexing. Publishing teensy, 140-character updates? Whatever was that good for? Twitter seemed like a ghastly mashup of the preening narcissism and nanosecond attention spans that defined the worst trends in digital culture. Tim Ferriss, writer of productivity books, called it “pointless email on steroids.” Who cares what you had for lunch? But critics misunderstood it. What Twitter truly portended wasn’t small, it was huge. As I argued in my first-ever WIRED column more than a decade ago, Twitter represented a massive shift in the way we pay attention to one another. The status update took off and we entered the era we still inhabit: the age of awareness.
Before the age of awareness, people conversed via blog posts, threads in discussion forums, email chains. You read someone’s missive, pondered it, wrote back. It was newfangled and digital, sure, but it nonetheless echoed the tempo of industrial life—the postal service in the Victorian period, bickering with fellow citizens in letters to the editor. Utterances were infrequent and somewhat lengthy.
Twitter inverted that proposition. The posts were microscopic, and they came in a constant spray. Sure, each update was so short as to seem meaningless, if considered on its own. But that’s the thing: Their power was in the aggregate. Follow someone’s updates for weeks, months, or years and you’d develop a rich sense of that person’s internal life. It was like hearing them think out loud, all day long.
Or, like a “superpower, like a sixth sense or something,” as Biz Stone, the Twitter cofounder, told me in 2008. “I know where everyone is. I know what their current mood is.” The status update allowed people to engage in flocking behaviors, both online and off. Twitter made flash mobs a part of life. “You become like a macroorganism,” Stone said.
Pretty soon it wasn’t just Twitter. All social media reformed itself around the status update: Facebook’s News Feed became a stream of just-in-time missives; Instagram, a stream of photos. (Tim Ferriss joined Twitter and now has 1.54 million followers.)
The hashtag emerged—producing a new and even bigger zone of awareness, bursts of joint attention where a million people would suddenly drop what they were doing to gawk at something: a plane crash-landing in the Hudson River, fists raised in the Arab Spring, a baby biting a kid’s finger. Our focus wasn’t just on our friends anymore; we were refreshing the feed, waiting for the next mesmerizing moment. Sometimes—increasingly—it was the spectacle of a pile-on: Justine Sacco making what she thought was a joke about AIDS, Africa, and white people, then getting off her plane to global condemnation; a woman calling out two male coders at a conference, then fielding death threats for months.
Our global attention was now fully cyborg, which meant, of course, that it was hackable. Political actors of all stripes neatly intuited this—from #blacklivesmatter activists moved to action by Trayvon Martin’s death to #gamergate’s venomous nerds dog-piling on Anita Sarkeesian. News stopped being something you looked at occasionally; it was live and interactive, all day long. Something could blow up into the national consciousness at any instant, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame compressed to 15 seconds.
Which is, really, the subtlest problem of our status world: It has made us prisoners of the here and now. Status updates work on two levels: We get insight into individual brains over the long haul, and there’s always some new piece of gossip, some OMG moment to react to. It becomes hard to look away. Harold Innis, the Canadian media theorist who laid the groundwork for Marshall McLuhan’s thinking, famously predicted that modern media would make us “present-minded,” unable to focus on anything except what’s happening right now. Bingo. President Trump, in this sense, is a leader for our times: He’s a master at using a single outrageous tweet to instantly hijack the nation’s consciousness.
Our new powers are almost too potent. We’ve become like those sci-fi telepaths who can’t quite control their abilities and struggle to screen out the blaring thoughts of humanity. So now it’s time to cope and adapt, and forge the next phase in our age of awareness. What will that be?
In the short run, we’re likely to see evermore AI sprayed at the problem. Facebook has promised to rejigger its feed to show us more truly useful and rewarding things (and less crap designed to game our national attention). This might work, but the economics make it unlikely: The social networks are making bank right now, so there’s little incentive for them to seriously revamp their attentional mechanics. Looking further into the future, it’s possible a more drastic change could come externally, with some new upstart service that crafts an entirely new form of update—one so enticing that it kills off the tweet, the snap, the Facebook post. (Though odds are Facebook would simply phagocytose such an innovation, putting us back at square one.) Congressional action could compel changes to our awareness-o-sphere, but that would require, well, congressional action.
Or perhaps change will come from within. Might our own appetite for endless updates wane? Could we reach some cultural saturation point where we tire of being so tightly connected and voluntarily slow down our broadcasts?
It’s not impossible. People like Tristan Harris and organizations like the Center for Humane Technology are talking about it. But the truth is, we remain devout users of updates because—despite their tribulations—they’re so useful. They’re how friends ambiently broadcast news of births and deaths and sicknesses (and coordinate support); how we discover bands and news and trivia and idiotically brilliant memes. More to the point, they feed what is human about us. We are social creatures to the bone, nosy and curious about each other, eager to find our place among our kind. We are status seekers on any platform.
Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) is a longtime columnist for WIRED.
This article appears in the October issue. Subscribe now.
MORE FROM WIRED@25: 2008-2013
- Editor's Letter: Tech has turned the world upside down. Who will shake up the next 25 years?
- Jack Dorsey and ProPublica: Experimental journalism
- Jennifer Pahlka and Anand Giridharadas: Less elite philanthropy, more democracy
- Elizabeth Blackburn and Janelle Ayres: Germs gone good
- Kai-Fu Lee and Fei-Fei Li: Bringing humanity to AI
- Kevin Systrom and Karlie Kloss: Closing the gender gap
Join us for a four-day celebration of our anniversary in San Francisco, October 12–15. From a robot petting zoo to provocative onstage conversations, you won't want to miss it. More information at www.Wired.com/25.
