Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital wrote a nice piece about Twitter and how many people she found outside the tech bubble who had no idea what it was. This kind of shock and disappointment is common for people who don’t come up for air often enough.
Last Christmas I asked the members of my family about various aspects of technology. I didn’t even bother with things like Twitter. I was probing mostly about RSS. Some knew of it. Fewer had a good idea of what it did and none used it. They all read blogs directly from the websites, no aggregation. Shocking. The Internet, like the entire Silicon Valley, is a giant reality distortion field. If you don’t check things out from a different point of view, you can get a very inaccurate notion of what is true.
As Kara so aptly points out, while Twitter looks like the hottest thing since sliced bread, when you take off your reality distortion lenses, you realize we’re not even close to being there yet.
