I recently read David Gelernter’s article on edge.org, “The Second Coming”. Later the same day, I read some reactionary screed against twitter in a newspaper. The contrast between the two was pretty extreme, and got me bubbling away with a few ideas on the interesting transitions our culture is going through.

I present these ideas in a semi-edited form, for your appreciation and re-use. Nothing here is necessarily true or final, in a cunning demonstration of my eventual conclusion…

Firstly, Gelernter describes something that underlies what is compelling about Twitter, in a very tangential way:

Your car, your school, your company and yourself are all one-track vehicles moving forward through time, and they will each leave a stream-shaped cyberbody (like an aircraft’s contrail) behind them as they go. These vapor-trails of crystallized experience will represent our first concrete answer to a hard question: what is a company, a university, any sort of ongoing organization or institution, if its staff and customers and owners can all change, its buildings be bulldozed, its site relocated — what’s left? What is it? The answer: a lifestream in cyberspace.

I’ve talked about twitter being like telepathy before, but this really catches another compelling aspect: twitter crystallizes conversations in a more accessible way than I have experienced before. Discover someone because a friend replied to something they said? You can uncover the entire conversation chain of replies, look at the branches in the discussion, find other new people of interest. When you find someone who is really interesting to you, you can look through their history and the conversation streams they have been a part of.

There’s a layer of people who have heard of twitter but who don’t have any experience deeper than following celebrities and their friends. This is the shallow part of the experience, and complaining about it is like listening in on two people who are getting together for lunch and gossiping about famous people. It isn’t interesting to an outsider, but is the lubricant for a lot of social interaction.

The fascinating thing about twitter is the easy emergence of groups and communities that dig deeper. Allow me to demonstrate.

Let’s say we have a group of people who find each other by some opt-in resource, say twittgroups.com . There are varying levels of quality of poster in there. The people who spam or waste time get unfollowed or ignored. The best posters turn up more often in useful conversations when people search or look at the history of interesting discussions. More followers within the community of interest means a greater ability to call on the resources of the community for their projects.

Twitter simplifies contributing to communities of shared interests. It makes it easier to find valuable people without the complications of facebook and myspace ‘friend’ relationships. It freezes the contrails of discussions without adding friction to the conversation itself. The way these build on the core mechanic of Gelernter’s lifestream — the ‘crystallised experience’ — is one of the elements that makes Twitter indispensable to me and many others.