A New Word Dorseying: Leaving Before the Fried Turkey Explodes
December 3, 2021
Full disclosure. We post Beyond Search tweets to Twitter. We use a script, and we use an account set up years ago. I don’t recall who on my team did this work, and I am not sure I know the password. We did this as a test for one of my lectures to a group of law enforcement and intelligence professionals to illustrate how a content stream could be implemented with zero fuss and muss. The mechanism is similar to the ones used by certain foreign entities to inject content into the Twitter users’ content pool.
Why’s this important?
Twitter is a coterie service; that is, the principal users are concentrated on the left and right coasts of the US. The service meets the needs of this group because tips, facts, and observations about technology and its world are essential to the personas of the most enthusiastic tweet generators. There are secondary and tertiary uses as well. Spectrum pretends to care when its customers point out yet another service outage. Political big sparklers generate outputs for their constituents. Vendors of diet supplements find the service helpful as well.
But Twitter, like other social media services, is in the spotlight. The trucks carting these high intensity beams are driven by wild eyed and often over enthusiastic elected officials and laborers in the gray and beige government cubicles.
Write ups like “Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model?” and “Twitter Bans Sharing Private Images and Videos without Consent” provide purported insight into the machinations of the new Twitter. But the main point is that Twitter allows humans and smart software to create personas and push content to others in the tweetiverse.
Dorseying means that one individual is getting out of Dodge before the law arrives. This exit is less elegant than the proactive departure of Messrs. Brin and Page from the Google. From my vantage point, the former big dog of the Tweeter wants to be undisturbed and work in less well illuminated locations. Is Dorseying an action similar to running away from trouble? Interesting question.
Can Twitter be enhanced, fixed, or remediated?
My view is that anonymous and easily created “accounts” required some thought. The magic of censorship is likely to be less impactful than short lived special effects in the early Disney films. (Does anyone remember the cinegraphic breakthrough of “sparkles”?) The amping up of advertising is likely to lead to a destination that many have previously visited; that is, one with carefully crafted paths, exhibits, attractions, and inducements to buy, buy, buy.
Net net: Twitter, like other social media, will be difficult to control. My hunch is that the service will continue to snip through social fabrics. Because Twitter is a publicly traded company, management has to respond to the financial context in which it operates. Fancy talk, recommendations, and half hearted editorial measures may have unintended consequences. That’s what concerns me about the tweeter thing.
Dorseying was a good move.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2021
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