Some more Questions

To 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. [...]

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.

Be Careful What to Tweet

This week alone there were two minor scandals on Twitter that reached the media, both about someone who tweeted something that the wrong (or right, depends on what way you look at it) person read. The first was a Dutch politician who publicly discriminated Chinese people;

Basically he said ‘I easily overlook a gook, there are so many!’, since tweets of most Dutch politicians are being collected on kamertweets.nl a large audience witnessed this particular tweet. He did appologize for this, as a politician he has too. But harm had been done. Another guy just got a job offer from Cisco and tweeted about it;

Not too long after this Cisco channel partner advocate Tim Levad responded, ‘Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web‘, oops! The lesson today is to be careful what you tweet or write, about on any social media for that matter. Even if you delete a tweet it will still be visible on Twitter Search, at least for a while. Nothing wrong with critism on Twitter, but if you get negative about your job or a whole group of people, you never know who follows or read you in the end.

Amsterdam Twestival 2009

Yesterday I had a great evening at the Amsterdam Holland Twestival 2009, meeting tweeple in real life, meeting new tweeple and party. The Twestival was being organised in 175+ cities across the world, all partying for a purpose for charity:water. The event was entirely organised by volunteers and a huge succes with over 200 visitors, probably much more. A lot of vistors were using their iPhones or Blackberry’s and twittering in public, making pictures which can be found on Mobypicture and Flickr. I tried to make some pics with my EEEpc but that only works with some light around.

One day later it’s interesting to find some messages and new followers on my Twitter accounts from tweeps I talked to in real life last night. I could use some more meetings like these. Let’s see what happens between the people who met last night and the new contacts.

Thesis Proposal, 1st version

Important possibilities in Twitter are being reflected in the variety of platforms, websites, devices and programs that can generate messages that are being sent to Twitter itself and then simultaneously and real-time being distributed to several (other) websites, devices and programs. Why is there such a growth in external applications? This research is giving an overview of applications and the use of spam and linguistics within Twitter. The features this website offers and the uses of the RSS feeds have many possibilities and implications. What are its relations to older technologies and what are its uses, could Twitter be a remediation of older technologies or do we need new concepts?

Netiquette on Twitter

Besides flamewars I wonder what netiquette users follow on Twitter. When for example I reply on a blog and I leave my Twitter url, this blogger might add me on their list of friends, basically a list of users they follow. Also when people find out I write my master thesis on Twitter or some art project they might start to follow me. Yesterday I was playing around with the search option and tried to find people near my and through my postal code found another user and I thought it would be nice to say hi. Next thing I knew I had been added to his list of friends and I was being followed. Don’t get me wrong, I like being added so please keep following me! The thing is I don’t know if I should follow people in return as some tweet all day long and it’s hard to keep up. But is it rude not to follow people? They cannot see that I occasionally check their page anyway through my list of followers. Is there a netiquette I should know of? Should I follow anonymously or not?

Please, Don’t You Tweet on Me

Yesterday I was caught up in a discussion with a fellow student about Twitter when she posted a public message to me after discussing one of her ‘tweets’. It dawned to me that I could not delete that message as it was her ‘tweet’ and there’s nothing I could do about it. So she can write anything to me and everybody who reads it will link that message and me together. So it doesn’t matter what I write on Twitter, although I was a bit careful at first, now all other users can write notices to me which can put me in a bad light.

The same is happening now on Facebook where these tweets can be transferred to, so all friends of me or even friends of friends can see my tweets in my feed or their own. And I can tag photo’s of other people with their name and it will show in my feed and theirs, being displayed for both our friends or friends of friends. They could remove the tag but the information will not leave the feed.

So even if we’re very careful on what we write ourselves on websites like Twitter and Facebook, other users can write things about us or upload pictures we rather not have online. And of course the netiquette should prevent this, but will people respond when you tell them not to? I know my friends would, but we’re not alone out there. And I don’t have a solution just like that with a snap of my fingers.

Privacy Online

What is the freedom we have on network websites like Hyves and Facebook? Just this month a women was convicted for having written bad notes about her ex on her page on Hyves. This page however was only visible to her friends she added there, not for people she didn’t know. So her spokesman said it’s like saying things to your friends in the privacy of your own home. These friends talked about the notes and the rumours reached the ex of the convicted women and he pressed charges. I think it’s logical that you cannot say anything on a public website if it’s discriminating, but if only a select group of people can read it, then I don’t think it’s a public website anymore. My profiles on Hyves and Facebook are not visible for anyone but for my friends only, and according to the case I just described I should be careful what to say to them? What if I would write a private message to them? Could it be an offence if I write anything discriminating? Aren’t these notes the same as e-mails then? What is the value of a private profile if you cannot write about things that matter to you? The boundaries of these network websites are not set but the makers are working on that, but so is the law and judges. I am curious and worried what are the possibilities and restrictions in the near future. I feel as if the eye of Big Brother is looking over my shoulder right now, as I write this down for you to read.

Privacy issue

Op het Internet hebben bedrijven en marketeers verschillende mogelijkheden ontdekt om reclame te verspreiden naar potentiële consumenten. Dit kan via mail, banners, nepberichten in nieuwsgroepen en pop-ups. In tijdschriften en op de televisie is reclame slechts toegespitst op verschillende groepen maar op het Internet kan dit afgestemd worden op het individu. In het hoofdstuk ‘The Internet as test bed’ uit ‘Niche envy’ van J. Turow worden diverse voorbeelden toegelicht. Via koopgedrag of formulieren kunnen gegevens van gebruikers achterhaald worden en verzameld worden in databases.