Feb 14, 2009 Posted by Herko on Feb 14, 2009 in All things Web, Personal notes | 2 comments

Why I use Twitter

Recently, there has been some buzz about the microblog­ging ser­vice Twit­ter, such as the free news­pa­per De Pers call­ing Twit­ter ‘mind mas­tur­ba­tion’, and there­fore some­thing tossers would use. This inspired an arti­cle on the sub­ject by Floor Drees on the IKKI web­site, which in turn sparked a dis­cus­sion among its vis­i­tors and staff. I am omong those who replied to that dis­cus­sion. The ideas expressed there, as well as some oth­ers I recently came across, have lead me to reflect on the rea­son I use Twitter.

Defriend your­self!

The term of this week seems to be ‘defriend­ing’. It’s not even in Wikipedia –yet– so it must be fresh. Web­site Mar­ket­ing Facts writes about it, a sure sign that it is to be a trend for 2009. Basi­cally, it means you clean up your social net­work so that only peo­ple who you’re actu­ally in a friendly or closer rela­tion­ship with remain. The basic premises behind this idea is that the value of your social net­work is higher, if the online equiv­a­lent reflects your offline one –or some­thing like that.

It was fast-food chain Burger King who took defriend­ing to a new level. With the Face­book app Whop­per Sac­ri­fice you earned a free Whop­per for every 10 friend­ships you ended on Face­book. After a week, Face­book ended the viral as 233.000 friend­ships were sacrificed.

Face­book sac­ri­ficed the Whop­per Sac­ri­fice viral

I think the whole assump­tion that your social net­work should have only “real friends” is wrong. At least, in my case. My social net­work is made up of peo­ple I’d like easy access to, and who do, like and know things I find inter­est­ing, and with whom I’d like to share some of the things I do and find inter­est­ing. I haven’t per­son­ally met all these peo­ple, nor have had con­tact with them. That doesn’t make their ideas any less valu­able to me tho.

The Dun­bar Number

So why is the scope and extent of my social graph impor­tant for why I use Twit­ter? For that, I need to intro­duce you to the Dun­bar Number. Dunbar is an anthro­pol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity Col­lege of Lon­don, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neo­cor­tex Size, Group Size And Lan­guage In Humans where he hypothesizes:

… there is a cog­ni­tive limit to the num­ber of indi­vid­u­als with whom any one per­son can main­tain sta­ble rela­tion­ships, that this limit is a direct func­tion of rel­a­tive neo­cor­tex size, and that this in turn lim­its group size … the limit imposed by neo­cor­ti­cal pro­cess­ing capac­ity is sim­ply on the num­ber of indi­vid­u­als with whom a sta­ble inter-personal rela­tion­ship can be maintained.

The num­ber he cal­cu­lated was 150. If you carry this num­ber to the social graph, you could argue that the human brain is only able to cope with 150 or so sta­ble rela­tion­ships, thus any­one with a higher num­ber of friends in any of their net­works, has unsta­ble rela­tion­ships, and are there­fore worth less then those with sta­ble rela­tion­ships. Thus, one should defriend and sta­bi­lize his graph. (for more info on this sub­ject, read Christo­pher Allen’s great blog post The Dun­bar Num­ber as a limit to group size)

Source of inspiration

Like I said in my intro­duc­tion, my online social net­work is my main access to a lot of inspi­ra­tion. I have real life and long time friends there, fam­ily, co-workers, peo­ple I have worked with in real life, peo­ple I have col­lab­o­rated with online, peo­ple I haven’t met and would like to meet some day, peo­ple I’ll prob­a­bly never meet but whose ideas, skills and works I admire. I haven’t got sta­ble rela­tion­ships with 150 of them –prob­a­bly far less. But they reflect on who I am, and how I like to be per­ceived, and what I do and don’t do, and what ideals I have and don’t have. They reflect on me.

Now, lets get to the topic of this post, why I use Twit­ter. Twit­ter is espe­cially in the pic­ture when the defriend­ing topic sails along, as it is both easy to add peo­ple to your net­work (you just click ‘fol­low’ and you’re done) and for other peo­ple to add them­selves to your net­work (all they have to do is fol­low you). But for me, Twit­ter isn’t just a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my social graph and an easy way to know what my friends are doing all day, but some­thing else entirely. It is a source of inspiration.

The mod­ern day Hearth

This is some­thing Stephen Fry pointed out in his talk at the Apple Store in Lon­don on Apple and Twit­ter and so forth. He basi­cally said that the human race has a long his­tory of exchang­ing ideas and trans­fer­ring knowl­edge. He was talk­ing about audio­books, but the same applies to Twit­ter in my opin­ion –he is Twitter’s self pro­claimed vice-president, as only Barack Obama has more fol­low­ers then him.

Any­ways, he basi­cally says that with the inven­tion of he print­ing press by Gut­ten­berg, knowl­edge exchange moved from a social, inter­per­sonal expe­ri­ence into a dis­tanced, indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence. Before the mass dis­tri­b­u­tion of printed knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, there were sto­ry­tellers who, in dif­fer­ent forms –songs, tales, plays, opera’s, etc.- immerse the lis­ten­ers into the story, thus con­fer­ring it’s mean­ing and shar­ing its expe­ri­ences and lessons. The most basic form of this oral dis­tri­b­u­tion is the hearth. Around the hearth the sto­ry­teller is in direct con­tact with his or her audi­ence, and shares not only his words, but also the non-verbal mean­ing, sus­pense, expe­ri­ence and even drama. Thus, mak­ing it a rich expe­ri­ence, prob­a­bly anchor­ing the expe­ri­ence in the audi­ences minds far bet­ter then most books ever could.

This struck me as true, and I imme­di­ately fol­lowed this logic to my use of Twit­ter. To me, Twit­ter is the mod­ern day hearth or vil­lage pump. It’s a place where I choose to go to and share my expe­ri­ences, my daily finds, my emo­tional states, my inspi­ra­tions with any­one who is inter­ested –for what­ever rea­son. And I look for other people’s expe­ri­ences, knowl­edge, daily finds, etcetera as well.

And the beauty of Twit­ter –for me– is that it’s not long dis­tance. Yes, it is a-synchronous, but I can reply to tweets, send them a direct mes­sage, and start con­ver­sa­tions. In other words, the bar­rier to get in touch with the sto­ry­teller is very low. I can eas­ily get in touch and enrich their expe­ri­ence with my own, and even build a relationship.

This is why Twit­ter for me is such a source of infor­ma­tion, expe­ri­ence and inspi­ra­tion. It lets me see things from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and sur­prise me with insights –both good and bad. It is the Social Graph and Social Net­work stripped of all web-technology-imposed bar­ri­ers. I inter­act with other peo­ple, not with web appli­ca­tions or web­sites that aggre­gate the per­sonal aspect to a man­age­able social blob. To me, Twit­ter is the mod­ern day hearth.

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2 Responses to “Why I use Twitter”

1. anneke says:

   19 February 2009 at 8:41

   hi lieverd, mooi stuk heb je geschreven en inter­es­sant hoe jij dit gebeuren via iner­net beleeft. Voor mij is de sto­ry­teller ook altijd een voor­beeld geweest om duidelijk te maken waarom zoveel menen in Ned­er­land schri­jven en waarom er zoveel per­soon­lijke ver­halen op papier komen. De drang tot erken­ning, het maken van con­tact, je stem laten horen of alleen maar luis­teren (of lezen) is bijna bij ieder mens aan­wezig denk ik. Mooie ver­halen komen dan op papier. Gebeurt dat bij twit­ter ook, of is het meer het con­tact en de uitwissel­ing die daar cen­traal staat? Veel liefs en tot gauw
   Anneke
2. herko says:

   4 March 2009 at 10:20

   @2525 hier is mijn bericht over aaarom ik twit­ter: http://tinyurl.com/bc6dx2

   This com­ment was orig­i­nally posted on Twit­ter

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