Peripherally, I’ve been tracking Twitter-talk that’s crossed my radar. A lot of people have been decrying it as trivial time-wasting. This being what was said about blogging as well, I wasn’t convinced. So I signed up and gave it a whirl. (My username is eminently guessable; same one I use on LJ.) I was curious about the affordances, and the userbase, and the use of it.
See, I tend to think that we don’t use stuff that’s useless to us. So what is the use of Twitter? Is it a game? A social tool? If the latter, what sort? Is there social status to be gained or lost, or gamed? Is it communicative? Of what?
(danah boyd would be much better at this kind of analysis than I am—and now that I look, she’s said her piece already. But I guess there’s room on the ’net for rank amateurs.)
My first impression, which I haven’t quite managed to decide whether I still agree with or not, stirred me to go look up a bit from Tehanu:
“Will you be about the house?” she asked him, across some distance. “Therru’s asleep. I want to walk a little.”
“Yes. Go on,” he said, and she went on, pondering the indifference of a man to the exigencies that ruled a woman: that someone must not be far from a sleeping child, that one’s freedom meant another’s unfreedom, unless some ever-changing, moving balance were reached, like the balance of a body moving forward, as she did now, on two legs, first one then the other, in the practice of that remarkable art, walking…
(A moment of silence for the appreciation of remarkable beauty in writing. Right. Onward.)
It’s definitely nowhere near as simple as “Twitter is a woman’s tool for maintaining social connection.” Of the ten Twitter “followers” I picked up yesterday, three are men, and I haven’t seen anything anywhere indicating that Twitter has an anomalous gender breakdown compared to the rest of the ’net. But something is lurking in that, something that indeed concerns the care and feeding—and just plain awareness—of where our social connections are… in time, in space, in mental-space, in okay-space.
I, for example, pay a lot of attention to where my husband is. He mentioned shortly before the move that he needs new glasses, so when our HMO’s provider booklet finally got here, I found out where they’d moved their optometry center and what bus lines go there and gave him the information. It’s just a thing that I do. Pay attention. He, on the other hand, had to be reminded last night that I’m in San Antonio most of next week. Without value-judging here—he doesn’t pay attention to where the people around him are, it’s just the way he is. And he’s not alone in that. A lot of people don’t, and to them, Twitter is indeed noisy mindless trivia; how could it be anything else?
For those of us, like Tenar, who do or must pay attention, Twitter (something like RSS, and I’m not sure it’s coincidence that Twitter put in RSS feeds by popular request) simplifies the task of maintaining that awareness. Who’s up, who’s down, who needs help, who can give it, who’s traveling, who’s bored at home, who’s in crisis, who’s out to lunch. I was thinking yesterday that it’d be nice to get my husband on Twitter, so that I wouldn’t feel a need to chase after him wondering what he does all day… but the flip side of that coin is Ged: because my husband, like Ged, doesn’t see importance in paying attention to others’ cues, he doesn’t see the need to emit cues of his own, so he wouldn’t use Twitter, any more than he’ll blog (and I’ve tried to introduce him to blogging; it didn’t take).
I suspect without proof that Twitter would confuse and perhaps overwhelm my husband, actually. Much more information than he’s got the mental-social interface to process. For me (though I suspect I am not typical owing to general social deafness), building and maintaining that interface involves guesstimating where the normal range is for the people I know and care about, and a steady process of scan-and-forget for most of the information that passes by indicating that they’re still in that range. When they’re not, I can see it and react.
I occasionally see people withdrawing from the blogosphere or from other social-software interactions on the grounds of “too little brainspace!” Well, yes. Tracking all this stuff does take brainspace; for me it frankly takes practice, because I’m like my husband in not being born to it. I’m not surprised all the detail gets to be too much to take in or react to. It’s all in the importance one places on this particular style of maintaining connection—and if that importance is not much, Twitter must be a hellpit indeed.
The problem with Twitter as a tool in the sense that I have outlined is the reciprocity assumption that danah boyd talks about a lot. If there’s an implicit obligation for me to friend all my followers (which I have not in fact done), then suddenly the presence information I do want to track is mixed in with a lot that I don’t, and utility vanishes into the maw of diminishing returns.
I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one. Invisibly following someone (so that they would not have to reciprocate) is much too close to stalking to seem tenable. Getting rid of public Twitter friendslists eviscerates the tool’s discovery system. Perhaps a LiveJournal-like system of allowing a user to split friends into groups without the awareness of those friends, such that the user can track one group of “real friends” while still being able to save face and friend all followers, would do the trick. Twitter would have to be careful to let all @ messages to a given user through in all that user’s group views, though (even @ messages from someone who doesn’t belong in a given group view), or the jig could be up.
Whew. That’s a lot for a first impression. Sorry.
My second impression, which I spent a lot of the day fishing for, was that Twitter has a very IRC-ish feel—short messages, informal register, many-to-many communication, even down to lack of capitalization. Some of the complaints I’ve seen about Twitter being too much information too fast, or about seeing only half a conversation, hint that some Twitter users are making it into an ersatz group-chat mechanism. (Not my group, incidentally. Such use of Twitter is not universal.)
But where IRC is divided quite sternly and inescapably into well-defined groups on the basis of shared interest, Twitter is an atomized web of friendship-clouds (ugh, horrid mixed metaphor, but I hope you see what I mean) that may or may not overlap much. It’s divided by individual affinities, not by group interest.
And that’s interesting. No, hang with me a second while I explain. An oft-leveled criticism of the blogosphere is that it’s a bunch of echo chambers, like-minded people loudly agreeing with each other while ignoring or antagonizing dissent. Removing the political overtones from that assessment (because I think they’re unnecessary and overblown) leaves us with “a bunch of largely non-overlapping interest groups.” Which I think is a fair description of IRC, or Usenet for that matter.
I’ve never thought that a fair description of the blogosphere, though, and I don’t think it’s what Twitter is, either: both are built around individual affinities, which span interests and interest groups alike. I admit my current Twitter follower/friend groups don’t support my own assertion, being mostly librarians. Still, I do overlap with my friend Rana’s group too, and if I stay with Twitter, there will doubtless be more such overlaps, because I myself am such a miscellany. And what’s more, I found myself surfing Twitter through a trail of other people’s friendslists into areas without a single known face, something that’s impossible to do in IRC without the abrupt discontinuity of actually changing rooms and subjects.
So I find Twitter intriguing and yes, even useful. I can imagine it being useful organizationally, even, as an internal tool for tracking interruptibility and busy-ness and the flow of work—if (and this is a big, huge, colossal if) the individuals in the organization all place value on both tracking and being tracked. It only takes one recalcitrant to break such a system, and I would think that imposing it from above would be a complete non-starter.
As an informal grassroots tool, though… maybe. Perhaps. In some organizations, especially geographically-dispersed ones.
I don’t know whether Twitter is a fad or a stayer, either. Right now I’m not even sure that one’s callable. I don’t even know whether I’ll stay; I have my own fairly stark limits on social-interaction brainspace, and plenty of other ways to keep up with folks who matter to me.
I’ll be watching, though, because I’m still curious about interest-delineated versus affinity-delineated tools. My vague, sloppy, unverifiable impression is that the social internet has been slowly tilting toward the latter, while retaining a healthy share of the former. Time will tell whether there’s anything in that.
