Trying to explain Twitter to the non-user has become something like the tech world’s Arthurian challenge, a seemingly impossible task that no-one is able to fully complete. And while I love Twitter, the moment I try and describe it to someone not immersed in web culture, I am suddenly struck by how ridiculous the whole thing seems: “You, umm, have 140 characters to, like, say what you’re doing or, err, say something smart or funny”. In my more intellectual moments, I try and describe it as ‘the rebirth of the Nietzschean aphorism’, but in both instances, I’m met with deservedly sceptical looks. Perhaps the best way I’ve heard this difficulty captured is that explaining Twitter is like explaining sex to a virgin – you don’t really ‘get it’ until you’ve done it – which, all things told, isn’t a bad way to think about things.

Of course, that’s not to say that there haven’t been good attempts at explaining Twitter. It’s just that Twitter is so nebulous, so multiple in its potential uses – social tool, news source, microblogging and so on ad infinitum – that it’s become to difficult to explain it in terms of specific functions rather than as a platform with open-ended possibilities. Yet, the one thing that people keep coming back to is, well, the fact that they keep coming back; for some reason, one that I’m not sure we’ve been able to fully figure out yet, Twitter is remarkably compelling. What is perhaps more surprising is that this happens despite it having many uses, some radically different in purpose.

But while the tech set are in love with Twitter – so much so, that some wish to declare it an essential service – the mainstream criticism of Twitter is often its seeming pointlessness, particularly when it shows just how narcissistic people can be. And while this is quite valid – many Twitterers have a habit of describing their most recent meals or worse – it is perhaps this very self-concern that is the reason for Twitter’s success. After all, one thing that Twitter does well is to provide a space into which one can ‘write an identity’ into a public arena. By ‘writing an identity’, I mean locating one’s sense of self ‘elsewhere’, in a virtual space that we can use to not only reflect what we are feeling, thinking and doing, but also the other way round: to invent ourselves through the act of writing.

And what is interesting about the service is the way in which it allows that collection of moments that are one’s ‘tweets’ to become a sort of narrative: if you want get a sense of what I’m thinking and what I’m doing – and in some sense, ‘who I am’ – simply go and read my Twitter. It is, of course, ‘artificial’, ‘limited’ and produced for public consumption. But as Diana Kimball notes, perhaps Twitter has become “the platform on which we’ve chosen to construct our artificial authentic selves”. If identity in the postmodern era has become fractured, ineffable, merely a set of shifting markers, the linking of Twitterers and their tweets is an opportunity to locate one’s identity at a ‘site’, a semi-fixed point in relation to which one orients oneself. The persistence of Twitter – the fact that it is there when you are not – is what leads to a sort of presence for identity, a virtual space that works to produce you to others as you produce it. And in this sense of writing oneself, there’s something to the disjointed, microscopic nature of Twitter, the fact that it is only a collection of tiny snippets, that allows its users to piece together stories over time about themselves and those they follow.

But if one aspect of Twitter is its capacity to produce personal narratives, it is also interesting for the narratives of community that it creates. Take a look at anyone’s stream, whether internet celebrity or random user, and you will find a collection of anecdotes and thoughts from a group of people who, while they may have never met, form a sort of ‘community’. But unlike many other online communities that are formed around a common interest, Twitter is simply formed out of the common activity of Twittering. As such, the sorts of communities one finds are often centred around things like humour, tone, snark, geekiness or other traits that usually, by themselves, wouldn’t be enough to gather around. Indeed, what is often so fascinating about Twitter is precisely the communication with people who you wouldn’t normally talk to, whether that means a regular user like me connecting with Mathew Ingram or Molly Wood, or one of the thousands of discontinuous connections and friendships that happen when you stumble randomly across someone’s profile.

In both aspects – whether individual or community – Twitter functions as a sort of fixed point on an otherwise complex and constantly moving web. It is, like many ‘net tools, agnostic and therefore prey to not only the narcissism with which so many people associate Twitter, but also spam, sniping and an overwhelming amount of ‘noise’. But like other web tools, it is also redefining the boundaries of identity, creating a link between an online self and one’s real one, perhaps even blurring the line between the two. While the service itself is still suffering through growing pains and is still struggling with that minor issue of a business plan, it will certainly be interesting to see the stories that Twitter’s individuals and communities will continue to create.

Note: The image used here comes from this post on Consumerist.