When first engaged, it’s hard to see how Twitter could be useful east of the Cooper. It allows you to send short text messages to a global audience and subscribe to receive tweets from your friends.  It’s the tersest form of social media, a sentence and half, 140 characters.  It can shared between computers, cell phones and other Internet appliances.

The main page on the Twitter Web site enjoins you to inform the world of “What are you doing?”  

Some responded by advising the planet of what they are having for breakfast or where they were headed on the subway.  That may be mildly interesting if you’re Ashton Kutcher (the first person to get one million followers on Twitter, just beating out CNN).  However, Twitter helps sustain nervous suspicions the global economic contraction may have been driven by the Internet’s apparently unlimited capacity to absorb and annihilate productive human attention.

However, Twitter morphed from the briefest form of electronic narcissism to a unifying parallel info stream summary of Web culture in 90 days.

Twitter becomes useful when software filters and aggregates relevant material and users begin to send material which facilitates such use.  Combined with the capacity to link to related Web content, Twitter helps pull the Web together.

Hack codes facilitate this process. By searching for “#chs” you can isolate tweets related to the Charleston area.  South Carolina is “#sc”.  Web sites like Monitter and programs like Tweetdeck make it easy to sort the relevant tweets into columns on related subjects.  

These tweet streams can be ported to a Web site, adding continuous, instantaneous content from a global feed to a Web site.

Many tweets include imbedded hyperlinks to blog posts, Web sites and videos.  Web sites like tinyurl.com shorten links to get more meaning out of the precious 140 character limit.

Recently #therescue allowed demonstrators in 100 cities to cooperatively update thousands of followers worldwide on their effort to raise awareness about African child soldier abductees.  Tweets came from the sidewalks, camps (including one West of the Ashley, #therescue #chs) and vehicles of participants via participant’s phones. A roaring tweet stream was part of their Web site referencing global press coverage available online, fresh YouTube videos and images posted on Flickr.  

Lowcountry news site TheDigitel.com, picked up local elements and “retweeted” them with links to their own local coverage.

Last week’s lockdown at West Ashley High School didn’t lock down text message traffic out of the school, which was relayed to everyone monitoring #chs hackcode. News organizations monitoring #chs were on the story within minutes.

Twitter brings global reach, portability, and connectedness to Internet communications.  My tweets are linked to and appear on my Facebook updates. It’s possible to do it the opposite way.

S.C. Secretary of Education Jim Rex tweets once or twice a day, often linking to a detailed press release on the Department’s Web site.

Governor Mark Sanford has a twitter account. Freshman legislator Anton J. Gunn, has tweeted 892 times this session, often from the floor of the SC house of representatives, to his 354 followers. Combined with tweets from other legislators, one can stay hours or days ahead of other legislative information sources. A Mount Pleasant police sergeant and other departments tweet details on traffic conditions and wrecks to #chstrfc.

All these tiny messages, even when they’re coded and sorted into coherence and linked to detailed content, certainly aren’t a substitute for a 5000 word New York Times foreign policy article.  It’s hard to track national or international affairs through Twitter. The world is more complicated than 140 characters can reliably convey.

Search for “Obama” or “Iraq” and Twitter begins to look like the Matrix. One gains an appreciation of what government security agencies attempt when they’re reading everyone’s e-mail to discern who is a terrorist and who is discussing  their last Halo 3 session.

At present, economically struggling traditional media lend coherence to what Twitter and other social media do.  Major stories and events radiate across the Web the way cold and warm fronts organize the weather.

What the status update chatter will look like should the networks and newspapers not survive is disturbing to contemplate. The landmark cultural mountains of significance the reporting resources of major media outlets represent may flatten to the point where the infosphere becomes a level jungle of chatter. Organizing the nation around a major issue, or the community around local ones, may get harder.

We can make sure the East Cooper area is working forward. Using hack codes #mpsc, #suvisc, #iopsc and #disc would allow us to pull together local chatter. Understanding how these new technologies work can assist local businesses and government.

A well crafted tweet isn’t digital Haiku. It begins by deploying the substantive detailed Web content, linking it usefully and tweeting out a short, pithy note which will carry an interested user to the referenced content.

A restaurant should have a Web site with a map and menu online so when it tweets out the availability of fried green tomato salad, people can find out what it costs and where it is. For politicians, a solid press release needs to be waiting at the other end of his tweet’s embedded tinyurl with links to the relevant, pending legislation.

Will Twitter restore the economy, bring peace to the world and sell fried greet tomato salad restaurant specials?

Maybe not.  

We don’t even know if Twitter is here to stay.  It’s may just be “What are you doing?” now.” around #iopsc, #suvisc, #mpsc and #di today.

William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com, http://twitter.com/wjhamilton29464) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village.  You can comment on this and other opinions in the Moultrie News on www.moultrienews.com.