Harvard Business Review, I’m calling you out
Love some insight into whether or not I’m overreacting to this…
First, I typically really enjoy HBR. They usually have great articles and I learn something every time I pick up their publication or hit the website.
But this article by Tom Davenport is sloppy and almost irresponsible. You can read the article and see for yourself, but basically he’s making the point that Twitter isn’t a useful medium because he personally doesn’t think the conversations are “important”.
It’s an absurd point, as if the only reason to have a way to communicate with people is so you can talk about things that Tom Davenport thinks are important.
What also makes me mad is that I posted a comment basically stating the above, but he never approved it. Figures.
So, am I overreacting? HBR has a lot of readers, most of which likely are NOT on Twitter, so when they read something like this they’re likely to write off the medium because HBR says its not important. That bugs me.
I think the set of people who strictly control the comments allowed on blog posts and the set of people who don't see the value in Twitter overlap a great deal…
I mean, think about it. The reason he doesn't “get” Twitter is because it unravels the asymmetrical nature of his relationship with the world. He's important because he writes for HBS and I'm not because I don't. How dare someone like me presume to engage him in conversation and disagree with his opinion!
That's what Twitter does. The walls and the artificial barriers come down and the ivory towers crumble. Some people just can't wrap their brains around it.
Your reply did get posted, BTW.
Thanks TS, they must have approved it in the last few hours. At least there's that.
Absolutely, you nailed it. I'm getting so tired of people using Twitter-bashing to make themselves feel important.
PS – as TS pointed out he finally approved my comment. Though I can't say he did it because he read my blog because why would he read anything he himself didn't write.
What is worse? Twitter-bashing to feel important or Tweeting to feel important?
;-)
Point well taken, there are people using Twitter to feel important. But that's based on insecurity whereas bashing people for using Twitter is based on being an a-hole. So I guess its worse to be a basher unless you're bringing some intellect to the conversation.
Saying people are tweeting about “unimportant” things and hating on it because of that, that's just a-hole behavior. If I find it useful to communicate to my friends via Twitter, there's no reason people should hate on that.
I agree with you here. I read the article and I loved how he pointed out that there is not much meaningful conversation on Twitter or social media in general. Like you said, look at the telephone, email or letter writing (to go way back) most of those have meaningless stuff. Not everything is going to be the Magna Carta, Bill of Rights or a Shakespeare Play. But the way we are communicating with social media has improved and will constantly change. Look at the recent Iranian elections, we would never had known about issues had it not been for Twitter.
Again, the telephone, radio, television and internet were all fads, so I guess social media is a fad now too. Let's hope he's ranting for readers and not serious!
Exactly! It's such a sad, limited view when people bang on social media rather than looking for the positive aspects and asking why people enjoy using the service instead of mocking them for doing so.
I can only imagine back in the day when the first people were using car phones (remember those huge things we used to put in our cars that were the size of shoe boxes?) and people were mocking them for not being able to wait until they got home or to work to talk to someone. Now so many people use their phones in their cars that we have to make laws to stop it.