Originally posted some time earlier. Recycled for maximum blog churn. – dp
Women are different than men. Shocker, I know. But consider the following observation. It proves one of two things: A. That I am a chauvinist ass or B. That while painting with a timezone-wide brush, there’s some truth here worth considering.
My argument, unsupported by recognized fact or demonstrable metric, is that Twitter is to male communication styles as Facebook is female varieties.
Limited to 140 characters? “Thank Gawd,” says the man who saves his phonemes for later. The ability to get in and out of an exchange of information while making less noise than an antisocial ninja? Love it.
Facebook, on the other hand, is the triumph of noise over signal, but in an homage to McLuhan, the noise IS the signal. And the message is, “I’m still here.”
I picture this going all the way back to our barely bipedal progenitors. The hunters kept it focused, reportorial and purposely terse. “Mammoth, there. You go right. I go left. Hike.”
The gatherers had an entirely different comm strategy to deal with their challenges: frequent, rapportorial “whatcha doin’s.” “Hey Ogg, I’m gathering berries over here now. Where are you? Oh good, the cave bear didn’t eat you. By the way, did you see just how smartwonderfultalented my little guy is? His thumbs are opposable!”
Now all this is not in any way a value judgement, but seriously, it’s critical to understand how a tool works before selecting it for a given task. That’s why I prefer Twitter for some things, but Facebook for others—and am annoyed when people just lump the two together.
Twitter = report. Facebook = rapport. And now Google+? Cocktail party (that nobody shows up for? We’ll see…)
