Wednesday, Apr 16, 2008

Some thoughts about Twitter

Experience by Austin Govella

Random thoughts about Twitter as an ad hoc social platform, intimacy, the relative nature of phatic communication, and forgetting.

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There were a couple of interesting thoughts about Twitter that came out at the Summit. It’s not all my thinking (the Summit haze obscures the memory), but I thought it was interesting.

Twitter breeds a false sense of intimacy

Much of the communication that occurs on Twitter is the type of thing you normally say only to people you’re very close to. After a long day of work, you might go home and tell your spouse, partner, or roommate how your iced tea was watered down, the copier was jammed, and your gelato was the best you’ve ever had.

Because a lot of these messages are the types of things you usually speak to people you’re close to, people you’re less close to start to feel like they’re in your close group. You can confuse a marker of intimacy with the actual status of the relationship.

Twitter as a platform

Lots has been written about how people socialize around objects (like photos on Flickr).

At the Summit, I noticed how Twitter provided a platform for ad hoc socialization around an event. (The event is an object.) So , people in a presentation would talk back and forth about the presentation, as it happened. And as soon as the presentation was over, a separate and different “object” would emerge for people to Twitter around (lunch, dinner, drinks, whatever).

Twitter exposes the relative nature of phatic communication

For people I don’t know well, random Twitter quips function like phatic, “hey there”, communication. However, for people with whom I’ve invested in a relationship, seemingly unimportant information about the “best gelato ever” feeds into my picture of them, as well as our shared history. It becomes a part of our culture.

Throwing away phatic communication

When people complain about this kind of unimportant, throwaway information (whether it appears on Twitter or in a blog), they’ve been distracted by the falling price of memory.

Existing systems and cheap memory mean our machines can (and do) remember everything we say.

Blogs emerged with assumptions from Content Management Systems where all content must be findable: blogs assume you want to find everything. They have search, time- and category-based archives, and ways of surfacing most popular, best rated, or most recently or even just most commented.

Twitter dispenses with this nonsense and encourages tweets to be forgotten, lost in time. Once a tweet has been replaced in recency by other tweets, it’s forgotten—despite the fact it still lives in a database somewhere.

Forgetting is good. When less important cultural information fades away, it allows more important concepts and ideas to stand out. They become memes. We don’t need to find memes on a blog because we find them in our heads.

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