Follow and Connect

The cool thing about following people on Twitter is that they don’t have to acknowledge you, following is a one way function, though it’s nice if people follow you back. You can always block them too, so you will not appear in their overview but they can still see your page, if it’s not set to private. Following another user is something like bookmarking them (that’s what I do sometimes) or becoming their fan. On Flickr they have the same system where users can add another user as a contact. This contact can approve this request of friendship or not.

On a lot of social network sites a friend has to be approved and this only works if both users add each other. This also means that one of the two can break up and the other one loses a contact in his or her list. On Twitter a user is constanly aware of their friends as their tweets appear in the general overview. This same concept goes for friends on Hyves and Facebook where there’s a feed of friend activity although here a user can decide to read less or more about certain friends or groups. I do wonder why on one site a friend has to be approved and on another site this is not the case. Does this has anything to do with privacy or more personal content?

Another thing that gets more important on Twitter is the number of friends or followers a user has, especially since the launch of overviews like the Dutch Twittergids.nl (where my account @twesis is 1^st on the wordpress list, 2^nd on the blogger list and student list and 17^th on the top100 list). For some people this number represents a grade or level of popularity. This number has a high importance in the book ‘Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom’ by Cory Doctorow.[1] In this novel Doctorow introduces ‘the notion of “Whuffie,” a kind of measure of social capital. People check out (“ping”) one another’s Whuffie when they meet, and that gives them some notion of how much respect and credibility the other has’.[2] Meaning on social network sites and Twitter this is already a reality when the number of followers or friends could give a user a higher credibility.

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[1] <http://craphound.com/down/>

[2] <http://dylan.tweney.com/2003/01/13/down-and-out/>

How Annoying is Following?

Today I decided to try an experiment on following and followers and their behavior. I found a tip on the blog of @TheBusyBrain. He suggests to follow all his followers and see how many of them follow in return. To do this experiment I didn’t want to add hundreds of followers to my basic account @artgrrlas I would have to read thousands of tweets all day long, I need my tweetfree moments too! On my new experimental account @twesisI did not just click on the followers of @TheBusyTrain but also on followers of followers and people I follow through my frst account. Anyway, after about 800 followers I stopped and before lunch I already had more than 120 users following me back and almost 40 direct messages and @replies in which some thanked me for following them. Some of these direct messages are automatically created by SocialToo. I should automatically follow anyone who follows me now, but I still have to click users by hand, oh well. As I write this I have about 200 followers and 60 direct messages.

Following and making friends on Twitter is quite different than on other social network sites I think. On Hyves and Facebook I have only a handful of friends I’ve never met in person. Then again I don’t share much personal information on Twitter either. On my first account I do not follow everbody in return though (sorry, I have to be honest here). In this experiment I have to wait for 24 hours and see how many followers I have by then. I think I also follow most people of the Amsterdam Poken meetup now, see what happens there. To follow and to be followed is still fascinating to me, I want to understand it and therefore I have to do it. It’s all part my the participatory research. I wonder if people think it’s annoying that strangers follow them, or do they collect them no matter who they are? Why do people follow in the first place?

The Thing about Robots

Last week Mark Meadows came over to our class to give a lively lecture about robots and artificial intelligence. He’s a cute artist and new media author and brought a book (Pause & Effect) that was hysterical visual in a good way that I must have. He’s also designs digital humans, builds virtual worlds, and engineers emotional interfaces. Robots, he argues, are systems that replaces humans. He gave us several examples, starting out with talking cars and TomTom, all telling us what to do, sometimes in an aggressive way. Sometimes these messages can be very confusing and leading to akward situations. Meadows asks himself and addresses to us if this is a way we want to go? Also computers are telling us what to do, like downloading updates or saying we need a certain plug-in. Robots can notice things, like medical robots and tell us what to do. An example of these is the TMSUK (security, health or defense) robot. Then we talked about avatars and how we become something else if we spent more than 8 hours a day as an avatar, not just a visual avatar but also our persona on Facebook or Hyves. (Meadows didn’t want us to think he just spends his life as an avatar because he told us a story about his boat too.)

If robots replace humans, then a cardboard cop could be a robot too, and the mechanism that closes a door could also be a robot. But what about traffic signs? Robots are semiotic systems, but are signs and symbols robots? So robots are semiotic devices about to influence us by replacing other humans argues Meadows. But robots are made by us so we basically we influence ourselves then. I wonder here how far we can stretch this definition, what’s a robot and what’s just a tool or a sign. I’ll get back on this.