Twittered out

Is Twitter progress?

Well, yes it is. For now. But already, people in the know – most of whom Twitter, or have Twittered – are already referring to Twitter as a “time suck.” That means that Twitter, before long, will assumed its place alongside other digital, Web-based activities that once were smart but now are known time sucks, which suck away a human being’s time without leaving the human being anything to show for it.

To better understand the gravity of such a result, let us recall what it is like to paint wood trim, or moulding. If you have never painted wood trim – around doors and windows in an ordinary bedroom for example – then you have no idea how slow and painful the passage of time can be. Painting moulding is as close to infinity as a human being can approach. That is because moulding possesses all the physical characteristics of infinity. A battleship, seemingly vast, can nevertheless be painted in less time than it takes to paint the moulding in our sample ordinary bedroom.

Now imagine you have painted the moulding with a dry brush. No paint, just bare wood behind you, stretching away to Andromeda. That is the kind of time suck that Twitter is. Ninety-five percent of the Web universe is a bare-wood time suck. Hard to believe, but I can sense the day when we will ask, “What’s on the Web?” Answer: “Nothing but old movies.”

Can you say the word, “bubble?” No, of course, the Web does not constitute a giant unified bubble. There are pockets of content that consumers can learn from and take forward with them, and there is a demographic, constituting maybe 15 percent of Web users, who LIKE time sucks. But it doesn’t take totality for a bursting bubble to shake things up. A relatively small bubble of sub-prime lending just about wrecked the mortgage industry and undermined other financial structures like gophers tunneling away all but a crust of dirt beneath the Taj Mahal.

The Web is thousands of communities attracted to content of interest only to those within those communities. The Web, most of all, is a marvel in making content available to small audiences who the traditional mass media could never serve. All those small audiences taken together, though, add up to significant percentages enjoying the novelty the Web provides them. But in the media world, novelty is totally finite. More finite in some places than others. If you are painting moulding, you may feel novelty for as long as five minutes. Novelty for “Seinfeld” lasted longer, around seven years, and it is still holding for “American Idol,” though it needed re-tooling this season.

There must be finiteness to small communities of people enjoying their hour of accessibility to unusual, even bizarre, pockets of content on the Web. One by one, as those communities burn out, there will be a declining number of communities attracted by novelty, and the number of novel subjects to attract them. For examples, watch television in the middle of the night, where resides content that once was new.

As this novelty fuel is spent, and the last time sucks have consumed themselves, one day a good part of the Web will collapse. Google will teeter then, not Twitter, as the search for novelty crashes. I would guess we could start looking for cracks around 2011.