Twittering

[The Prof]

I'm losing track of the number of people making 'unfortunate' twitters.

From US politicians ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_We ... ng_scandal) to a 17 year old 'youth' commissioner for the police

( http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/crime ... weets_row/)

Is it really a good thing or just rubbish

# sus anal bum party

[The Prof]

Obviously I think it's rubbish but I can see it had a positive influence during the 'Arab Spring' and in places where the media is state controlled.

This is what made me think of it

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04 ... ostpopular

[Your Friendly Neighbourhood Postman]

Rubbish.

140 letters/signs invite to act on impulse, do stupid things, insult, ruin one's career or marriage. It decreases one's attention span and it's very distracting. I guess the ratio: trivia/worthiness is 99 : 1.

There aren't that many people who can compress something meaningful into a tweet.

Politicians shouldn't tweet at all.

Twitter = many societal deficts and illnesses reflected by one stupid chatterbox medium.

[Bungo the Mungo]

It wouldn't work for you 'cos you're verbose!

[Your Friendly Neighbourhood Postman]

It wouldn't work for you 'cos you're verbose!

Could well be. And I do meander. Oftentimes.

[KeithPratt]

I’ve defended twitter and facebook on here before and I’ll do it again.

Their use to you depends entirely on the people or organisations that you choose to follow or interact with. As such you cannot define what it does with a blanket attitude because every user has a unique set of variables that determines the experience one has.

My use of twitter has led to me very rarely, if ever buying a newspaper anymore or in fact, watching the news on TV. If a news organization I value has their twitter policy segmented properly, then I’ll follow certain sections of it. For example, The Guardian has particular twitter feeds for certain parts of their newspaper, and I’ll also follow the journalists who write the articles. They may often have their own twitter account that “does not reflect the views of the organization that they work for”, which again helps to bring a sense of perspective.

I follow a number of journalists and organizations from across the political spectrum to help me build a bigger picture. So when Thatcher died last week, it went fucking crazy.

Indeed, the sense of speed at which one learns of events is hugely accelerated on twitter. The retweet function really is a work of absolute genius – and of course that has both positives and negatives. Memes seem to snowball at a staggering rate – the Joseph Cony farce of last year is testament to that. One could argue that a very savvy political organization could surely make capital on this, but the reality is that twitter is home to a bewildering patchwork of ideas and opinions and that, whilst battles may seem to rage on there very hard, there is no real particular consensus – which is a good thing. It must be very hard working at Twitter if you are in control of usage policy however.

When a new technology or medium and political opinion align, THEN you have a problem – like with radio in Nazi Germany, or perhaps with tabloid newspapers and Thatcher in the 80’s. But the upshot is that, say yesterday, I had seen three pictures of the Boston bomb blast within 2 minutes on my feed, or that I knew about Thatcher’s death immediately.

Perhaps the value of the speed at which we receive news needs to be re-examined in this hyper-real age, but the combination of brevity and speed makes for a more effective medium in my opinion than say, TV. Programs like The Day Today, Brass Eye and more recently, Charlie Brooker’s “How TV ruined your life” really hammer home the power of TV on us and not in a good way. Twitter allows another option and one that ultimately is personalized.

Like any deluge of information, filtering is the key to success and if you apply them stringently, then your experience will be magnified all the more so. It just requires a bit of work and effort.

[Your Friendly Neighbourhood Postman]

Good call in defense of it, Bleep. No irony involved.

I can well appreciate opinions that contradict mine, if they're well-worded.

Which is abundantly the case.

[The Prof]

However, newspapers and websites are divided up into sections with headings and you can see what you want to read. You make a choice.

Twitter is surely a constant stream irrelevant drivel mixed in with some 'news' so new that nobody else has heard it yet. So what? Even the news that's relevant, is it that important to know it 10 minutes before everybody else?

[KeithPratt]

Good call in defense of it, Bleep. No irony involved.

I can well appreciate opinions that contradict mine, if they're well-worded.

Which is abundantly the case.

There is no doubt that there will always be people who use this new function to bleat endlessly about rubbish. Having “followers” is a carefully selected word that does to a certain extent, provide a continual ego massage and perhaps, with a new report recently declaring that we have a generation of narcissists”, things like this do not help matters.

Ultimately however as an individual, you have the choice to not interact with it.

I guess you could have an analogy of a newspaper. In the past you’d buy a newspaper because on the whole, it provided good value. There is no newspaper in the world that any reader will read from cover to cover and agree with on every story and opinion. It may be one columnist who they think is a total tool, or that the coverage of a particular story was not to their liking. Or that perhaps they didn’t cover a story that they felt was important to them. A newspaper is naturally, a finite thing – it could not possibly cover everything and ultimately a selection of stories curated by an individual.

So what if you thought, well perhaps I want to curate my own news experience rather than having it imposed on me? For sure, some people won’t be bothered by such a thing and continue to buy stories that are selected for them, but twitter is like a newspaper but without the annoying columnist that you hate, and instead the local news story that you like reading about or the sports section from the newspaper whose political convictions you don’t agree with, but like the football writing, and all without adverts too.

[KeithPratt]

Twitter is surely a constant stream irrelevant drivel mixed in with some 'news' so new that nobody else has heard it yet.

The answer is simple. Don't follow anyone who posts drivel.

[Bungo the Mungo]

Their use to you depends entirely on the people or organisations that you choose to follow or interact with. As such you cannot define what it does with a blanket attitude because every user has a unique set of variables that determines the experience one has.

I've heard this defence (of Facebook, specifically) from Slider, too. I think it's bullshit.

Facebook tends to encourage certain types of remarks - brief, sometimes provocative, very often self-centred. It's also true that a lot of intelligent people are still staying away from Facebook altogether. If I scan my Facebook page it contains nothing much more than trivialities, and I'd bet that this is true for most people.

I'm not complaining, but I just think it's nonsense to suggest that one can finetune one's Facebook to make it more useful/relevant to oneself, and that everyone's Fb profile is different. You're always going to get pictures of cats, people saying 'wooh! I got the job!' and folk posting old youtube clips. That's the nature of the beast.

[Bungo the Mungo]

Anyway, Prof, it's tweeting and not twittering

[Dr Markus]

I'd be more worried about the lack of actual face to face contact as in meeting up with people. Facebook and the like is ok for keeping in touch, but i'd be more worried about the kids growing up with it and their social skills being damaged from over usage....and yes i know how possibly over the top that sounds but if i had a kid i'd like to think i'd kick him/her outside to play with their friends.

[KeithPratt]

I've heard this defence (of Facebook, specifically) from Slider, too. I think it's bullshit.

Facebook tends to encourage certain types of remarks - brief, sometimes provocative, very often self-centred. It's also true that a lot of intelligent people are still staying away from Facebook altogether. If I scan my Facebook page it contains nothing much more than trivialities, and I'd bet that this is true for most people.

I'm not complaining, but I just think it's nonsense to suggest that one can finetune one's Facebook to make it more useful/relevant to oneself, and that everyone's Fb profile is different. You're always going to get pictures of cats, people saying 'wooh! I got the job!' and folk posting old youtube clips. That's the nature of the beast.

The difference with Facebook is that the technology has mutated as it has grown and is much more complex than twitter.

There’s no doubt that their algorithms are pushing “relevancy” much more, with the emphasis very much on the people that it calculates you interact with the most. So, for example, if I want to message a few people as a group, with everyone able to interact on it, it will flag up first the people that I have contacted before previously and perhaps any others that are related to them. From a pure UX point of view, I don’t think there’s anything intentionally wrong with this because ultimately the algorithm is constructed to be helpful.

However to our much more complex brains, this does seem like a quantum leap in terms of how a website could “recognize” our “intentions” as it were. My sister, who is very much a digital immigrant, is really put off by google ads, facebook ads and the like and I can understand why – but it is only using the information that she or we provide it with.

Having worked in digital for some time, I think that the vast majority of people do not understand the implications of the information that they provide on a website. It is, after all, a free service and again it seems that some have trouble understanding that if you’re going to use something for nothing, the company hosting it reserves the right to try and make some sort of commercial gain out of you. Some people really don’t seem to get this point.

I guess the BIG problem with facebook is that to get to a point where you’re not seeing thousands of cat videos or whatever on your newsfeed, you have to do a lot of customization – i.e you have to manually go into your settings and change things. The default mode essentially is one big data puke – so you do need to look at each “friend” and assign settings to them. Again though, it is not the medium that is ultimately the issue, it’s the users that are providing the data.

Of the two, I would say that Facebook’s MO seems to be much more commercially orientated than twitter – and also that the relative simplicity of twitter means that one remains in control of the experience much more. Facebook to me seems a bit like George Lucas is in control of it because the experience is continually being tweaked and updated.

[Bungo the Mungo]

'a digital immigrant'?

[KeithPratt]

'a digital immigrant'?

The world is increasingly technology-focused. As such the definition of “Digital immigrant” or “Digital native” is being applied. Young people on the whole are natives – they’ve grown up with it and seem to be naturally able to adapt to new technologies and more importantly, the potential negatives/positives. A Digital Immigrant is essentially someone who usually refuses to adapt or takes a huge amount of time to do so.

The same paradigm can be applied to previous technologies, but the difference here is that “digital” is essentially a whole new realm. I’m sure that the same issues were at hand when telephones appeared – some people would have refused to get a telephone, because why did they need one? But ultimately, society imposes standards that everyone has to have – so for example, whereas 15-20 years ago, having an email address was a novelty for virtually everyone apart from a select few, by now it is almost a necessity for you to interact and get along in today’s world.

[Belle Lettre]

I follow more news agencies and organisations I'm interested in than actual "people", so I get quick links to articles I might not otherwise have seen. I haven't got time to trawl through a pile of newspapers.
And the people I follow don't post drivel.

[KeithPratt]

And the people I follow don't post drivel.

But er, you follow me?

[Belle Lettre]

You post shit.

[The Dríver]

I’ve defended twitter and facebook on here before and I’ll do it again.

Their use to you depends entirely on the people or organisations that you choose to follow or interact with. As such you cannot define what it does with a blanket attitude because every user has a unique set of variables that determines the experience one has.

My use of twitter has led to me very rarely, if ever buying a newspaper anymore or in fact, watching the news on TV. If a news organization I value has their twitter policy segmented properly, then I’ll follow certain sections of it. For example, The Guardian has particular twitter feeds for certain parts of their newspaper, and I’ll also follow the journalists who write the articles. They may often have their own twitter account that “does not reflect the views of the organization that they work for”, which again helps to bring a sense of perspective.

I follow a number of journalists and organizations from across the political spectrum to help me build a bigger picture. So when Thatcher died last week, it went fucking crazy.

Indeed, the sense of speed at which one learns of events is hugely accelerated on twitter. The retweet function really is a work of absolute genius – and of course that has both positives and negatives. Memes seem to snowball at a staggering rate – the Joseph Cony farce of last year is testament to that. One could argue that a very savvy political organization could surely make capital on this, but the reality is that twitter is home to a bewildering patchwork of ideas and opinions and that, whilst battles may seem to rage on there very hard, there is no real particular consensus – which is a good thing. It must be very hard working at Twitter if you are in control of usage policy however.

When a new technology or medium and political opinion align, THEN you have a problem – like with radio in Nazi Germany, or perhaps with tabloid newspapers and Thatcher in the 80’s. But the upshot is that, say yesterday, I had seen three pictures of the Boston bomb blast within 2 minutes on my feed, or that I knew about Thatcher’s death immediately.

Perhaps the value of the speed at which we receive news needs to be re-examined in this hyper-real age, but the combination of brevity and speed makes for a more effective medium in my opinion than say, TV. Programs like The Day Today, Brass Eye and more recently, Charlie Brooker’s “How TV ruined your life” really hammer home the power of TV on us and not in a good way. Twitter allows another option and one that ultimately is personalized.

Like any deluge of information, filtering is the key to success and if you apply them stringently, then your experience will be magnified all the more so. It just requires a bit of work and effort.

I think this perfectly sums up my view. Like anything, it's useful if it has a utility value to you as the user.

I think the retweet function is brilliant. The downside is that a lot of people retweet stuff without ever challenging it or checking its authenticity, hence the sick cashing in on the Boston bombing, or retweets of something which may be false, inaccurate, baseless, genuine, worthy, time-wasting, offensive, amusing, misleading, etc. by some loyal follower without a second thought. Of course, the same sort of thing happens on Facebook.

The ability to spread the word widely and quickly, though, is fantastic.