I overheard on the radio this morning, while scraping the toast, some mention of twitter and the fact that some person in Downing St. is twitting (tweeting?) regularly about what’s going on there. I made a mental note to look it up on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme listen again. Partly because I usually mislay mental notes and partly because my small group of twitter mates might be interested I posted a tweet (twit?) mentioning it. Within a short time someone posted a reply giving me the URL to the programme and how far to fast forward to find the relevant bit (14 mins 30 secs) and telling me that the Today programme runs a twitter channel itself. Looking at this I see that most, perhaps all, BBC Regional news services have twitter channels too. A little later my original tweet got another reply with a link to the Downing St. twitter channel and to Bill Thompson who was being interviewed on the Today programme, from where I found the interviewer, Rory Cellan-Jones. This in turn led me to another tweet with links to a Guardian article about the Downing St. twitter-er.
I must say I find the twitter phenomenon fascinating. It is ripe for sociological analysis and I’m sure someone somewhere is already doing it. It exemplifies so many aspects of on-line social networking - networks within networks, the power the ‘friends of a friend’ connections, the importance of reputation and status, the collective and collaborative evaluation and dissemination of information and resources, and much more. Who would have thought that a stream of short messages (max 14o characters), often about where people are, what they are eating, watching on TV, what mood they are in, what the weather is like where they are, that they are in a traffic jam eating chocolate, and so on could also be such a powerful research tool. And the seemingly trivial nature of many posts is not trivial at all in the context of groups of twitter-ers and the nature of their identities and relationships and the reality of their ‘virtual’ community. I’m getting close to abandoning the notion of’ virtual in these contexts. It just obscures more of the nature of these sorts of communities and their relations than it illuminates. The experience is real, the information is real, the people are real, their activities are real and, dare I say it, the feeling of attachment and even to some extent obligation are real. Or at least as real as in some networks and communities I am involved with off-line.
Tags: communities · twitter2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
I find twitter interesting also. So far my observations are that it seems to be a lot more personal than the blogs I follow. I follow several people on their blogs AND on twitter. It seems to me that when blogs first started, many of them were about “what I did today”. My guess is that blogs that “held up”, or are still active over a long period of time are more geared toward thoughtful reflection, news, and substantive issues (at least to the author). After all, how much navel-gazing can most people stand? To have a real conversation or feel that you are reaching people, you must soon branch out beyond yourself! (Well, unless you are a movie star. I guess there is ENDLESS fodder in celebrity lives).
So will twitter follow? Right now, I see a lot of tweets that are stream of consciousness and much to do with “I am at Starbucks”, “I am stuck in traffic”. I really LIKE the tweets with links, such as “I found this cool new website”. There is a thriving development environment producing tweet managing software–seems like a new one every day! (another thing you can follow on twitter, since posting sources are embedded in the tweets). So I am interested to see what the future brings. Will microblogging influence blogging? Or will tweet managers make twitter more like WordPress?
I think I have just inspired myself and I had better go post this whole rant on my own blog! : )
[...] Terry’s post today is one of those. I saw his tweet on the BBC story and then later saw, through my aggregator, that he had posted on it. I “clicked over” to read it in full and commented at length. So I thought I would re-post my comment over here and perhaps develop my thoughts more in time. I find twitter interesting also. So far my observations are that it seems to be a lot more personal than the blogs I follow. I follow several people on their blogs AND on twitter. It seems to me that when blogs first started, many of them were about “what I did today”. My guess is that blogs that “held up”, or are still active over a long period of time are more geared toward thoughtful reflection, news, and substantive issues (at least to the author). After all, how much navel-gazing can most people stand? To have a real conversation or feel that you are reaching people, you must soon branch out beyond yourself! (Well, unless you are a movie star. I guess there is ENDLESS fodder in celebrity lives). [...]