Time Puts Twitter On Cover, At Vanguard Of American Economy
What could Time magazine possibly have to say about Twitter that hasn’t been said in a thousand prior magazine and newspaper articles, and on Oprah? That it drives the American economy. In fact, Twitter is the new GM!
Park Sloper and Steven Johnson deliver that depressing punchline at the end of their Twitter cover story, out tomorrow:
It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and India. But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.
That’s right: America might not make actual things any more, but at least we’ve learned to occupy our time talking endlessly and unprofitably to one another, in an entirely massless location, about which other entirely massless things deserve our time and/or increasingly worthless borrowed dollars.
It’s a sort of self-eating economy only slightly more sophisticated than the financial services orgy of the prior 10 years, which ended disastrously. We just can’t stop doing this sort of thing. Yay?
This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savouring.
That’s the sort of sweeping, certain conclusion sure to please Time’s Economist- loving editor Rick Stengel. How’s it doing on the media platform of the future, though? Time’s James Poniewozik reports:
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
@El Matardillo: Exactly. Where does all the money for these new Twitter servers come from? And what is the business model?
Web 2.0 bubble about to burst?
I'm already feeling this story's impact. My grandma just called me to ask me a bunch of anxious questions about her twat. Thanks, TIME!
ihatetwitter
Hopefully, unlike GM, we taxpayers won't have to foot the bill to bail them out for failing to turn a profit ever.
swagv
@Aatom: Ha!
the fung
@El Matardillo: Or the perfect analogy for it.
Almostbanned
Tried to start my Twitter to go the store this morning and it wouldn't turn over. I think it is the fuel pump.
belltolls
@I Love New Jersey: Yes, but the fail whale killed the shark when it came crashing back down to the surface.
SwatLax
@7states: Perhaps not, but it's the most likely thing to happen since Facebook.
sample032
Hasn't Twitter jumped the shark yet?
So will this useless fad finally die now that it's hit the cover of Time? I mean, at least Facebook has a utility aspect, even if it's also somewhat inane. Twitter is all "@JeffTweedy You didn't play my song last night! #wilcorules" and "read my last story about farm subsidies! tinyurl.com #businessnews." I don't care I don't care I don't care I don't care ...
Awesome X
As a former Time Person of the Year, I find it a bit regressive that this cover only seems to be geared toward an audience of media twats who actually use this insipid platform.
I don't even own a cell phone. The only thing I can think of that I would want to Twitter is "Fuck off!"
Gotta go, it's time for my mood stabilizer.
I only post on Twitter about once a day, and I don't follow that many people, but I really do love the idea of Twitter. In practice, of course it has the potential to be extremely annoying. But I find it so theoretically appealing in the abstract, as a tangible, beautifully simple expression of the collective consciousness.
I want to subscribe to 'Twime' magazine, and I want the whole thing in 140 characters. It will probably reflect the amount of relevant information in a full issue of 'Time'.
America will start making things again when the fuel price to ship iron ore from Brazil to China, steel from China to Japan, and dishwashers from Japan to Colombus Ohio becomes so outrageous it makes sense to do it all here.
choinski
3.8 percent. That is how many people who use the internet use Twitter.
Stop trying to make Twitter happen. It's not going to happen.
7states
But you guys! It's so fun to talk endlessly about Twitter! On blogs! Maybe when Twitter Inc. is forced to add subscriptions for, you know, profit, it will die.
Is any one else annoyed that the cover is exactly 140 characters?
Because I'm hoping I'm not the only one shameful enough to type it out for themselves to check.
ms.conniving
"Buy a copy"? Please tell me that got sent out to subscribers.
'Resilience' eh? Yes, it's a stalwart, hearty population that faces troubles by bubbling up in a free, self-aggrandizing twinklebox.
Not everything 'cool' can make money. Some just change the world by costing a shitload.
They could have put a photo of a navel on the cover and it would have been basically the same deal.
application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use
WHAT applications? WHAT INGENUITY? It's Twitter. It does one inane, stupid, moronic thing that appeals to self-aggrandizing bores...
Oh... I see now why it's on the cover of TIME.
Twitter consumes massive amounts of capital and doesn't make a dime, so I've no doubt it's the vanguard of the new Obama economy.
I'll ignore the Twitter on the cover and instead focus on the iPhone.
Meta + Time = MeTime
see also: Twitter dot com
Obviously now Twitter is "too big to fail".