Thoughts on Interactivity

Is there a difference between people chatting with each other online or offline? What about chatting on social network sites on one hand, and Twitter on the other hand? There has been a shift in ways people communicate with each other since the invention of the telephone, then the mobile phone and now microblogging. Kate Crawford argues that chatting on the phone was already annoying to outsiders to begin with, although most of these conversations took place in private homes. The use of mobile phones in public spaces was even more annoying, as others who had nothing to do with these conversations overheard them. The content of these conversations were small bits of intimacy and the sharing of everyday trivia.[1] Crawford asks herself what happens to our understanding of intimacy when users share their everyday trivia or insignificant content within public networked space. This question lies in the same line with the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ of Marshall McLuhan, when the use of the medium is more important then the actual content. The content itself might not even be true or confabulated when people lie about their whereabouts, which is getting harder with the iPhone that blogs where it is. Also on Twitter all content is out there for everyone to see in real time, there is an interaction between people, and people and technology. Interactivity could be formulated as “an expression of the extend that, in a given series of communication exchanges, any third (or later) transmission (or message) is related to the degree to which previous exchanges referred to even earlier transmissions”.[2]

When I start looking at interactivity from a different perspective, I want to analyze what interactivity means on Twitter, what is happening between users when they tweet and reply to each other or if the system and users communicate. Mark Meadows argues that interactivity consists of three principles;

• input/output
• inside/outside
• open/closed

Meadows argues that “input should create output and the output should create input. It’s the interaction cycle’s ability to add information that defines the interaction’s quality”.[3] There should not be much time between the input and the output argues Meadows, the user should have a clear sense of change. I am not only looking at the system here, which can be either the Twitter website or any external application that displays a fresh tweet, but instead interaction from one user to another. When a tweet is posted the user expects this tweet to be shown on the Twitter website or the external application, but the user does not expect an immediate reply from another user.

Furthermore Meadows argues interactivity can be broken down into four steps, which are;

• observation
• exploration
• modification
• reciprocal change

People are being pulled in and have to take into account the world around them, being a virtual environment or not, they need a kind of awareness before they can begin to explore their surroundings. After making an assessment the reader takes action and changes the system. In the last step the system tries to change the reader’s actions.[4] When I take this model back to Twitter the reader is a user who gets aware of the environment of Twitter, through any given user interface. The user makes use of the possibilities of the user interface by writing tweets for example. The user can subsequently change the settings of the used application and the system replies by action accordingly to these settings. One of the action of the system can be displaying multiple tweets by multiple users as the user in this example started to follow lots of other users.  All the information of the followed users together gives an insight in their lives, giving some information of intimacy of their lives. Although there is not much left of any intimacy when this information shows up in a public timeline.

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[1] Crawford, Kate. ‘These Foolish Things. On Intimicy and Insignificance in Mobile Media’. in: Goggin, Larissa Hjorth. Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Taylor & Francis, 2008: 251.

[2] Rafaeli, S. (1988) ‘Interactivity: From New Media to Communication’, in R.P. Hawkins, J.M. Wiemann and S. Pingree (eds) Advancing Communication Science: Merging Mass and Interpersonal Process, pp. 110-34. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. in: Jacobson, Daphne. ‘Verhagen 2.0. De rol van Twitter in het contact met Maxime Verhagen en zijn achterban’. Unpublished paper, 2009.

[3] Meadows, Mark S. Pause & Effect: the Art of Interactive Narrative. New Riders, Indianapolis: 2003: 39.

[4] Meadows, Mark S. Pause & Effect: the Art of Interactive Narrative. New Riders, Indianapolis: 2003: 44.

Funny Example

Last weekend it was raining and I though it was a great day to put together some Ikea boxes and wondered if any other Twitter user came up with the same idea at exact the same moment. When I looked for only the word ‘Ikea’ I only got tweets from the last minutes, so Ikea surely was a hot topic that sunday! When I look for ‘dozen’ (Dutch for boxes) I get tweets with the English word dozen so I had to look for ‘boxes’ and found someone who wrote about Ikea boxes too;

@themurmish Ah, the smell of freshly opened IKEA boxes… 1:43 AM Jun 7th from web

Then I asked if he was cynical about this and he replied he could not wait for the smell to be out of his apartment. Not much later he replied a friend and him were writing a twesis too so we should stay in touch. This information was not on Twitter and I only found him because of Ikea boxes, funny how things go on Twitter.

#FollowFriday

One of the trending topics on Twitter is #followfriday and if you do not know what it is it is not easy to find out. The same goes for more than just this hashtag. The idea behind #followfriday is to promote users you follow and like so your followers can check them out and follow them too. Today I was suggested twice, just like last week;

Not too long after that I got a new follower, although I do not know if my latest follower follows me because of #followfriday I can ask him. I could however consider #followfriday as spam if many users I follow just post lists of usernames, some are really enthousiastic about it. On the other hand, users atart to unfollow people on monday, using #unfollow monday as an excuse.

Replies Today

This morning was a morning full of @replies;

Only on this particular screenshot you can only see half conversations, so what is the added value to an outsider?

In Real Life

Some questions I need to ask myself in order to structure my thesis chapter about my experience with Twitter. I have read the research of Edward Mischaud and consider the questions he asked some selected users in a questionaire. I will ask myself the same questions or similar questions;

How many users I follow do I know in real life?

At this moment I know 59 out of the 99 friends I follow today (June 4th). Four are virtual people (@buurvrouw, @TheMime, @NichtjeChelsey and @juffrouwjannie), two are cats (@stickiepoes and @timmedepim) and one is myself (@twesis). By knowing I mean I have met them in real lige at least once, like a Twitter meeting. Most of them are friends and classmates. The users I do not know are interesting or inspiring  people or organisations or they have something to do with my research subjects

Recommended Applications

Although there are a lot of Twitter applications out there Twitter has a list of favorite applications and warns for other applications, for they could be spam. This Twitterpage links to a list of applications on the Twitter Fan Wiki that I used to write about for my thesis chapter about applications. I wonder why Twitter would have favorite applications and links to a site that any user can modify? Are there two kind of applications, safe and unsafe? Do unsafe applications cause severe spam? Only one application is connected to Twitter, it is called Widget and can be connected to Myspace, Facebook, Typepad or Blogger. So this is more an extension of Twitter than just another application to tweet with.

I have had my share of external Twitter applications lately and I am still thinking about categories for them. I am curious if there are any malicious applications and I would like to test them, although not with my regular Twitter account! A better solution would be looking for stories about these applications. But maybe they have already been banned or blocked from the Twitter API. I should create a list of applications that I already used, the platform they function on and if they are one-way or two-way applications. And There are still some applications I want to use, although this is not necessary for my thesis.

More Coffee Tweet-ups

Last week I finally had an appointment with @ikbendAF who calls herself the (Dutch) Twitter ambassador. Because I call myself a (Dutch) Twitter specialist we had to schedule a meeting one on one for coffee. We first met on the Twestival where a friend of hers got a message that I logged in on Brightkite and then they started looking for me. Not too long after we met again in a bar in the Jordaan and she started talking about the photo book she is writing about Twitter. Here we agreed to meet for coffee and talked about twitter and following and tweet-ups and her book and my thesis. Because of mutual friends we also met at two parties the other week whit other tweeple. Some parties can inadvertently turn into a tweet-up. It is great to meet someone who actually knows a lot about Twitter and excange useful links.

Another tweet-up I planned on January 14th was a special coffee meeting for a few friends for which I used twtvite.com. I just bought a lattemento online, a device that makes devine frothed milk foam. Only two tweeple showed up but is was a nice social experiment. In a few days I will have another coffee meeting about croissants, because lately a lot of users I follow are mentioning them. For this meet-up I didn’t invite friends only so I wait and see who will turn up. I probably have to put more effort in tweet-ups, because I do not get much response so far. Maybe I should just spam my followers more.

Freedom of Speech (Freedom to Tweet)

In this blog entry I will try to combine some of my major subjects in my thesis, because it reflects what I experience on Twitter, it is about to follow or being followed and it is about what can be written on Twitter and what cannot be written, so language is important too. And I need to mention some applications that play a role in this context too. I do have some experience with following people and at the moment I follow more than a hundred users, but most of them do not tweet that much. I am being followed by more than 170 users but this number changes every day, some users join me and others stop following me. There is not much growth in this number of followers.

About the Environment

While I was thinking about the discussion about Google and the environment I wonder how bad it is to use Twitter. Every time a user looks something up on Google it takes a lot of servers to transfer the question and the answer. Take hundreds of thousands of search queries together and a lot of electricity is being used. Mark Ontkush suggested to turn Google black so a query would take less power. But what about a single tweet? If I tweet from my phone this device gets involved, the servers of my phone company, then some British phone company and all the computer servers that transfer my tweet to Twitter and from there to all the phones and computers of my followers. And that is just one single tweet! Take into account hundreds of thousands tweets all users tweet every day and there is a lot of electricity and resources involved. I have no exact data about how many tweets are being produced a day so I cannot calculatre the waste of energy.

Mark Ontkush argues that “a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor uses about 74 watts to display an all white web page, but only uses 59 watts to display an all black page”. This means that with a black background Twitter would be better for the environment and thus save our earth. Another solution would to use an energy efficient color palette.

This color palette should use only about 3 or 4 watts more than a completely black screen. None of these colors are present in this blog though, but I do not have that many visitors every day. I did however changes the color of the text of this post to #3d414c (cobalt).

Bio Experiment

In order to change my ranking on the Dutch Twittergids I changed the bio of @twesis and @artgrrl back in February and got great rankings, althoug they are not up to date anymore. In my bio of @artgrrl I wrote that I did not have any tweets since April 3rd, but this month I started tweeting again and by now I am back at full speed. Today I got some inspiration through a new follower who wrote in his bio he is single, why would a user write this in his or her bio? Does it say something about the user or are they looking for a partner on Twitter? As I am single too and I like Twitter experiments I changed my bio of @artgrrl to;

artist, blogger, 1974, coffee addict, single, doing a masters in new media, writing my thesis on Twitter Implications (twesis)

Also this morning I found another site that lists tweeple and is called Tweepguide, this site also has pages full of ranking but as this is an international site I don’t nearly have enough followers to get on any list. Tomorrow I should check the Twittergids Single Top 100 to see what my ranking is (based on my present followers @twesis should get the 3rd place and @artgrrl 13th). But what is the experiment? Over the next few days I should watch if other single people start following me or if I get any messages, or ask people about their bio.