Comments on Some thoughts about Twitter

Austin Govella — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:27:44 GMT

”... my perception of social intimacy is entirely relative. I may feel (and truly believe) I am close to you and you may feel (and truly believe) that we are not close at all—Twitter seems to allow us both to live that reality.”

Wow. That’s totally true. And although tat occurs occasionally in real life, I think Twitter exacerbates that disconnect because it lacks a lot of the physical social contexts that we have in the physical world.

Livia Labate — Tue, 13 May 2008 03:49:13 GMT

The ability to forgot is one of the most powerful things about Twitter. Not because Twitter actually forgets anything (it’s all there in the feed), but because we perceive it as if it does—out of sight, out of mind. That’s what makes it feel like a conversation and not a computer-mediated asynchronous communication tool.

What’s interesting is that there are ways to ‘remember’ (paginating back into history, retrieving favorited twitters, retrieving messages with hashtags, even googling a phrase if it’s indexed already). That’s actually quite a lot of ways to do that, but they are not front-and-center to the primary usage experience, which makes me think that Twitter is very elegantly designed to fulfill its primary use.

On your point about false sense of intimacy though, I don’t know if that’s really qualifiable as “false”, because my perception of social intimacy is entirely relative. I may feel (and truly believe) I am close to you and you may feel (and truly believe) that we are not close at all—Twitter seems to allow us both to live that reality. I think that’s a really fascinating aspect to how it mediate interactions/discourse.

Austin Govella — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:38:41 GMT

Tanya, I didn’t even know the Second Life island was going to be active.

I think part of Twitter’s brilliance is how it easy it is to use it to create a virtual world around any other event.

Tanya Rabourn — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:41:08 GMT

Apparently the IA Summit island in Second Life was pretty deserted. I’d say it’s because the more active virtual world was Twitter. On the whole the conversation constructed a temporarily bounded but geographically unlimited world. There were definitely tweets from those not physically present in a session or even at the conference responding to tweets about a given presentation.

Josh Williams — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:54:07 GMT

Re: Twitter breeds a false sense of intimacy
I’m not sure, exactly, that it’s a sense of intimacy that’s at work. Maybe it is. But I think it could also be that Twitter just shares some attributes of those more familiar (intimate) relationships. Like, in a Venn Diagram, Twitter and relationships might overlap in the area where it’s OK to make digressive, uncontextualized, non-linear, apropos-of-nothing comments. And even in Twitter it’s possible to create contextual boundaries (for example: tweeting anything to #IASummit2008 is fine as long as you’re at the summit or tweeting about the summit, but non-summit related tweets after the summit would be plain weird).

Re: Twitter exposes the relative nature of phatic communication
There’s a cool, short article that calls Twitter “Social Proprioception” from Clive Thompson in this Wire article.

Austin Govella — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:43:52 GMT

Dude. Awesome insight. I think that begs the question: when we communicate in person, how much does our audience *really* affect what we say.

We assume it affects a lot, but maybe it doesn’t?

Christian Crumlish — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:32:30 GMT

Really good insights, Austin. I was just thinking about the quasi- two-way nature of Twitter. I tweet something without thinking too hard about who is going to read it, but I read tweets as if they were addressed to me.