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.
[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.
