Some more Questions
15 July, 2009To get to the next level in my thesis I need to use this blog to ask myself more (detailed) questions, about what experiences of me and other users mean, what could be said about connectivity between users and what are the changes in their communication? What dilemmas are there in following and what does this mean? Why do some users refuse to follow other users and what happens to their connection in real life?
An example of problems with privacy is a user who says on one medium that he or she is busy or has made arrangements with someone, while on another medium (like Twitter) the same user says something different. It is difficult to know who reads a certain tweet and how this will be interpreted. It means that users have to be careful about what they write online and should take other media in consideration. It also means that privacy matters. Some users have a private account and deliberately deny access to certain users, although the users who are being denied access could consider this as an offence because both users have friends in common. The use of Twitter looks so easy as an account is made within a minute but once a user realizes he or she has to be careful what to say. The main question of Twitter ‘what are you doing?’ gets another meaning this way and is not about a certain activity forces the user to think, what can they do online and what should they not do? Friendships can be made on Twitter but also be destroyed because of mis-interpreted words. This is one of the Twitter implications when a user thinks somebody else implies something.
Just to be clear, the stories above are not my own experiences but bits and pieces of stories of people I follow and hear about. Even though an account is set to private, @replies to a private user can still be read through the use of Twitter search or Google. Stories can be verified this way and could add to the image of that private user. Although twitter accounts can be set to private, Twitter is still not a Walled Garden, in the sense that outsiders can still read @replies from other users. Social network sites which are a Walled Garden are more difficult to read without being logged in than Twitter. [...]
have you had (secondhand) experience in the destruction of friendships due to Twitter complications? obviously, misinterpretation or miscommunication in general can lead to serious trouble between friends, but Twitter doesn’t have a specific place or method in that, does it? you just got me wondering, cos the notion of destroyed friendships seemed to come up quite suddenly in this post :)
creating a profile of a certain user is exactly what Sophie Calle did, back in 1983 when she decided to contact some people in an address book she found;
“In June 1983, I found an address book. I photocopied the contents then sent it back anonymously to its owner, whose address was written on the endpaper. Since Libération had asked me to do an instalment piece for publication in the newspaper that same summer, I decided to contact some of the people whose names appeared in the book and ask them to tell me about the owner. Through them, I would get to know this man. I would try to find out who he was without ever meeting him and produce a portrait of him, over an uncertain period of time, which would depend on the willingness of his friends to talk and the turn taken by events.”