I recently wrote a post at Reputation.com Blog that examined the fad-like nature of social media.

I would like to look a bit more closely at Twitter in this post and examine why it has experienced such a remarkable cultural zeitgeist. First, we must come to terms with the fact that everyone loves, uses and talks about twitter. And I mean EVERYONE. CNN is tweeting. Politicians are tweeting. Celebrities like Ashton are tweeting. Oprah is tweeting, for the love of fun, and she makes and breaks main stream culture for a living. Read any social media blog or tech news site and you’ll inevitably run into a few twitter articles- per day.

So the question then becomes- WHY? Why have web nerds, tech-savvy students, PR firms, celebrities, politicians and the media complex writ large embraced the micro blogging platform?

The first reason has to do with ease of use. Not everyone has a laptop. The number of smart phones with web capabilities is growing, but still small. But almost everyone has a phone that can send SMS data. That means that Twitter opens the door to global, real time communication to end users who carry nothing more than a cell phone. That fact, in turn, lets more people participate in the twitter-verse by lowering the technological barrier of entry. The results are staggering. From the recent Iranian updates to breaking news via tweeting, the fact that a text message can now be heard around the world is an impressive and important milestone for connective technologies. It is also the primary reason that Twitter is so pervasive at the moment.

But ease of use can not explain the twitter-quake that has sent shock waves across media and culture. There are many reasons for the ubiquitous tweeting now found in the media landscape, but the one that resonates most with me is the overcompensation theory. I believe that the main stream media is overly hyped up on twitter because they were overly harsh on bloggers in the past and are now repping micro-blogging to seem “hip” and “with it.” In the recent past, traditional journalists often scoffed at bloggers and downplayed their journalistic credentials repeatedly. But the blogosphere would not be denied. It knew there was a real there there. And now blogs are seen as real and staying. And the MSM missed that bet completely. From politics to sports to local news, blogs have repeatedly held journalists and citizens accountable. Blogs have fact checked stories and reinvented old notions of the news cycle. Bloggers now routinely meet with Presidents and CEOs.

And now the intertubes are all aflutter with twitter. And this time, THIS TIME the MSM are not going to be left behind in the wake of a great techno shift. So they tweet and they tweet and they tweet. And part of the reason is because the technology is new and brilliant and connective and disruptive. And part of the reason is because they don’t want people to remember how established media cast a death knell for one of the most vibrant forms of media, art and online socializing ever created.