http://www.terrywassall.co.uk/terry/2008/04/19/the-worlds-a-twitter/
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.
Keywords: twitter
Comments
I do so agree with you Terry, especially with regard to "attachment" to a community. Interesting that your twitter was inspired by radio, another medium which evokes great attachment to a station or a programme or presenter. Before I began to study on line and became aware of online communities for the first time, I was very "attached" to different Radio communities. These attachments seem to have changed over the years they began with R4 for many many years, then R2, and now partially migrating to Classic Fm.
I seem to be becoming more attached to radio programmes that play old 50s and 60s music. This is probably explained by my age and a growing nostalgia for a rose-tinted version of my youth. It's funny how my attachment to Eduspaces has tended to cool after the TIG affair. I think this is because part of my commitment was to its 'youth' and the idealism of the pioneers and early adoptors. I guess my attachment is a bit more grown-up and complex now. I tend to identify with a group within and beyond eduspaces now rather than the whole thing. This is because it is more like an anonymous urban sprawl now rather than the rather cosy village it once was.