“The Twitter social-networking craze has taken hold in Brazil, where the number of users is growing faster than in the US, Britain, Spain, Japan and other developed countries. Brazilian politicians, athletes and celebrities of all kinds have succumbed to “Twittermania,” a phenomenon that has become a true source of first-hand information and threatens take over terrain from the country’s press services.

Among the most active users of this microblog tool on the Internet are soccer managers like Vanderlei Luxemburgo, auto racer Rubens Barrichello, Sao Paulo state Governor Jose Serra and TV host Luciano Huck, who tweet on Twitter to keep their “followers” up to date on their doings.

Twitter’s immediacy and pace have spurred Twitter’s progress in Brazil against blogs and other more traditional media. A study carried out by the private statistics firm Ibope Nielsen in 10 countries shows that, in the month of June, Brazil took the lead in Twitter’s worldwide penetration.

According to the study, 15 percent of Brazilian internet users visited the Twitter Web site in June either from home or their workplace, and the number of visits increased by 71 percent over the previous month. The figures surpass even rich countries like the US, where users of the service amount to 10.7 percent of all internet users, and in Britain, 9.4 percent.” – Source (more here)

My Take

For those that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s a service for publicly broadcasting what you are doing or what you wish to share in 140 characters or less. While I acknowledge its success and place in today’s culture, I can’t help but point out the fact that it smacks of the emergence of linguistic minimalism, a trend towards the unimportance of privacy and ultimately the big brother state, where streams of consciousness replace informational and opinion-based pages. Twitter itself states its goal as wanting to become “the pulse of the planet”, meaning it wants to read your mind and there’s no doubt that users are all too happy to oblige.

I always found it interesting (read>’backwards’) that people believe being online assists in staying connected with friends and family. Essentially, it is double-speak to say that being on your computer helps maintain and even improve human interaction. That being said, I can’t help but notice that my opinion is a tad bit like the pot calling the kettle black, as I grew up in this information age (of progressive A.D.D.). The only difference is, I’m keeping tabs of its effect on me and of my involvement in it. Most people cannot say the same.

The other issue with digitizing these short spurts of consciousness (or status messages/tweets) is, they do not spur on debate nor discussion. Take Facebook versus Twitter, for example. On Facebook, comments are optional but very rarely do they lead to the pursuit of knowledge in the form of dialogue. Twitter, on the other hand, goes one step further by not allowing comments, therefore prohibiting discussion. In a sense, you are what you tweet.

But to give Twitter some credit, it is useful as a link-rich news source. If I search for the word ‘Brazil’, I’ll get endless pages of tweets citing Brazil (even if most are teenage girls asking famous people to come to Brazil) and some offer up links to stories that I have started to post about here. Within a minute or two, Twitter told me that 50-odd more tweets had come in since my initial search results were shown to me. If only there were a ‘teenage girl’ filter so I could get more relevant results…

As far as Brazilians on the service, I can only hope their socialness wins out in the end and they stay true to the high cultural importance they place on human interaction…although, according to the article above, my hopes may have already been dashed.