Tag Archives: Twitter

Asking if digital technology leads to increasing loneliness

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Amongst people with whom I regularly interact, this would be a good question with which to start a conversation: does recent digital technology make us lonelier or bring us closer together? A sociologist at MIT has been investigating this for years and has some thoughts:

And what’s so dangerous about a made-to-measure relationship?
People would rather text than talk, because they can control how much time it takes. They can control where it fits in their schedule. When you have the amount of velocity and volume [of communication] that we have in our lives, we have to control our communications very dramatically. So controlling relationships becomes a major theme in digital communication. And that’s what sometimes makes us feel alone together — because controlled relationships are not necessarily relationships in which you feel kinship…

So these kids yearn for attention, but then, as you said, the idea of a phone conversation is too intimate for them — they’d rather text and chat.
They feel confused. That’s why I called the book Alone Together — because they shimmy back and forth. On the one hand, they’re so together that all they can do is text. And I identify with these teenagers, because it’s the way we’re all living our lives: you wake up in the morning, and you have 500 e-mails or 100 messages, and you say, “I don’t have time to do anything but respond to this.” So your life becomes completely reactive — you don’t feel alone, but you don’t feel connected.

What you certainly don’t have time to do is experience solitude. One of the most important things that we’re really losing is the ability to just be alone in a restorative way.

It sounds like the answer is that we are both more connected and more alone than before. In the end, perhaps what will change is how society defines relationships. Right now, we have traditional understandings of relationships (they require time, commitment, etc.) alongside digital understandings of relationships (they take place when you choose and more on your terms). In fifty years or even a decade or two, what’s to say that these digital relationships won’t be the primary form of human interaction in the world?

This reminds of a recent cell phone commercial that illustrates this “alone together” idea. This particular cell phone unit has a form of Windows operating system with an interface where you can quickly see if you have any emails or Facebook news. But the commercial suggests why this is necessary is so that you can quickly return to the really important things in life. In these commercials, the technology is treated as an accessory (and perhaps even an annoyance) – but a necessary accessory since you really need to stay up to date with those emails and personal news updates.

Talking about Twitter language and what it reveals about the world

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It may seem like common sense that people’s regional dialects show up in their online communication. According to a new study that examined “380,000 messages from Twitter during one week in March 2010,” people in California say “coo” for “cool,” southerners still say “y’all,” and New Yorkers are more apt to say “suttin” instead of “something.”

But I think the study does just go beyond common sense in some of its other conclusions:

Eisenstein said some of the online “accents” mirror those in the spoken language, but not all. For example, many people in the Great Lakes region tend to have similar accents when speaking, but that wasn’t necessarily found to be true in the study, he said.

“One thing I think that it shows is that people really have a need to communicate their identity — their cultural identity and their geographic identity in social media,” he said.

This is interesting: how exactly do people portray their identity through their online language? On mediums like Twitter, people make very conscious choices about how to speak. People of different regions and dialects can choose to use their typical speech patterns or not. And why do they make these choices?

A broader question to ask is how much do posts on Twitter represent reality? What sort of picture of the world does Twitter deliver? This study can help us understand what Twitter behavior is like but can it tell us much about the broader world?

A sociologist maps the universe of Twitter apps

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In recent years, services like Twitter have exploded. Perhaps to bring some sense to the dizzying array of applications available for users, one sociologist has mapped the “Twitterverse.”

I like this graphic. However, I would be curious to hear the greater purpose of this chart. Does it indicate the popularity of particular applications? Does it reflect the date such applications were made available? Or is this simply an informational chart meant to display the broad range of services available on Twitter?

Additionally, this chart is a reminder of the dizzying array of apps Twitter users can download. Sorting through all of the possible apps on Twitter or in other places (iPhone, Droid, etc.) could be a time-consuming process.

Malcolm Gladwell: “the revolution will not be tweeted”

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Malcolm Gladwell has been recognized by sociologists at being adept at combining social science and journalism. In a recent New Yorker piece, Gladwell is at it again, this time tackling the issue of whether participation in phenomena like Facebook and Twitter can lead to substantial social movements. Gladwell is skeptical:

But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
Gladwell argues that the kind of weak ties (citing Mark Granovetter’s important article from the 1970s) that social networks are built upon are not the kind of networks that lead to substantial action.
I would be interested to hear how social movement theorists would respond to this piece. Could social media be adapted or altered in a way that could lead to substantial change?
Also, Gladwell is contributing to a larger debate: can the Internet be harnessed for social good? There is little doubt that Internet access gives people a lot of information and perhaps the opportunity to build a weak-ties network. But does it typically lead to more productive citizens or more engaged citizens? Where does WikiLeaks fit into this – is that activism or something else?

Older Americans join social networking sites

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Social network sites, like Facebook, started as domains for younger people. But Pew Research suggests more and more older Americans are joining this online realm:

Half (47%) of internet users ages 50-64 and one-in-four (26%) users ages 65 and older now use social networking sites.

Half of online adults ages 50-64 and one-in-four wired seniors now count themselves among the Facebooking and LinkedIn masses. That’s up from just 25% of online adults ages 50-64 and 13% of those ages 65 and older who reported social networking use one year ago in a survey conducted in April 2009.

While Twitter is not as popular among older Americans, this rush to Facebook and other sites is interesting. If more older Americans are on these sites, does it change the online culture? How many of these older Americans join such sites to interact with younger people, particularly children and grandchildren?

Using Twitter as a data source; examining emotions and more

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In April, the Library of Congress announced plans to archive all public tweets since the start of Twitter in March 2006. So what might researchers do with this data?

A recent study provides an example. Scholars from Northeastern and Harvard examined the emotions of Americans through their Tweets. By coding certain words as having positive or negative emotional value, researchers were able to map out data. According to New Scientist:

[T]hese “tweets” suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings.

The mood map is cool.

While the findings about when people are happy may not be too surprising, the research does bring up the question about the value of Tweets as a data source. Since it is likely skewed to a younger sample and also perhaps a wealthier and more educated group, it is not representative data. But it could provide some insights into reactions to certain events or for seeing the beginning and end of certain trends.

So what else will researchers study using tweets?

Twitter as Goffmanian performance

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Peggy Orenstein writes in the New York Times about her use of Twitter. Here is part of her commentary which references famous sociologist Erving Goffman:

Back in the 1950s, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand. Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self. If all the world was once a stage, it has now become a reality TV show: we mere players are not just aware of the camera; we mug for it.

According to Goffman, every social interaction is actually like a theater drama as the individual actors look to play a role that ultimately saves them face. The advantage of Twitter, and other social software, is that it always a user to craft their performance at their own convenience. A user can reveal what they wish, when they wish.

Goffman was also interested in the divide between this performance and when an individual could be their true self. Individuals travel between these front-stage and back-stage worlds. Some users might feel they are revealing their true self in software like Twitter but I think this is unlikely. The act of tweeting or operating in front of a camera includes the knowledge that someone else is going to see what is revealed and this inevitably changes the action. Perhaps we can only truly be back-stage when we are in situations where they will be no human interaction. Goffman was also interested in these situations, such as when we are alone.

Using Twitter to solve your consumer problems

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Time suggests a means for getting your customer complaints addressed: take your grievance to Twitter. Steven James Snyder writes about an experience he had with Hotmail where a Tweet led to a quick resolution.