The Phatic Function

[drwex]

... or more on Ambient Intimacy

If I take the lack of response to my last post correctly it means nobody who reads my LJ uses Twitter. That's not hugely surprising, but it is slightly disappointing. The reason is that it has been argued that one cannot properly understand the value and use of Twitter unless one uses it as part of a fairly connected social network.

I thought that was a bunch of crap but am now waffling in my opinion in part due to a good piece on disambiguity.com discussing Twitter. (It's not as long a read as it seems - there are just a lot of comments after the posting.)

The blogger there, Leisa Reichelt, makes the point that Twitter is a lot like irc used to be, an app you left on just to see people come and go and to serve as a channel for lightweight chat. Of course, irc offers no barriers to more complex or prolonged conversations, which appealed to me back in the days when I was part of an irc channel set. I don't think Twitter has that, but I'm intrigued enough to want to try it, if I can get some useful experience out of it.

Back when I was a PhD student we had a similar issu with the systems we were building. I used to call it the "cast of thousands" problem - the software we were writing made no sense for one person, very little sense for a few people, and really was aimed at a cast of thousands. Now we have thousands of people using Twitter and its ilk - what's the value and experience they're getting from it?

Comments

[okelle.livejournal.com]

IMHO, Twitter is to blogging and online journals what fluffy magazine pieces are to serious journalism. Stop! I don't want to know what kind of candy bar you're eating right now!

[catness.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Rands likes it. I honestly can't be bothered. I am looking for ways to un-tether myself from my computer screen, not add more things to look at and/or update.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

What catness said. I spend far too much time in front of a computer (as now), when there are many other things competing for my attention which I would also like to do, but the computer is outcompeting them because ooh, shiny! So I consciously have not added twitter to my list of things I do regularly (although I have created an account, same username as LJ)(I had to go make sure of that, and discovered I haven't logged in since early April).

Mind you, Ms. Reichelt makes sense, it's just that I don't *want* that level of intimacy with that many people. Part of that may be work; I am intimately connected with too many strangers already as a function of my job; more is overload.

[harlequinaide.livejournal.com]

Actually, I always thought that, if LJ is a conversation, Twitter is a conversation between three hundred people, all of whom have ADD. Instead of writing a review of Richard II, I'd Twitter, "I'm at Richard II!" Then, five minutes later, "Richard II is awful." Then, "Ooh, the lead actor is pretty sexy." Single-concept blurts with no context to depth.

I know a lot of people who do Twit, including jgcr, who mentioned it in his last post, and champignon, who occasionally posts a daily rundown of her Twitter messages in her LJ (which is, sadly, locked). rednikki does it (but hasn't been reading LJ), and uses it in the way you say: she keeps it open all day at work to see what people are doing, but doesn't get messages to her cell phone (anymore). Her bosses are on it, as are some of her favorite actors. She says she's love a widget that would post all her "tweets" to her LJ.

Clearly, I'm too verbose for Twitter. Also, I'd have trouble not mentally referring to the people who sent me messages as "Twits."

[drwex]

Yes, this would be the point - to have a level of ambient intimacy with people I already care about. Doing that with strangers is pointless, which was the thrust of the argument that pointed me to Twitter in the first place.

[drwex]

I have to say that any resemblance between LJ and "serious journalism" is incidental at best. Really.

In particular, LJ is bad for ongoing conversations because you can't keep something going in an "old" entry and continually posting on the same topic is... meh at best. It loses the connection with the past comments and responses.

I do agree that I have a similarly negative response to Twitter's size limitations on transmits. On the other hand, people seem to manage to summarize entire weeks or weekends in bullet points that would fit very nicely into the Twitter size limit. What does that say?

[drwex]

Understood. I should probably un-tether more, myself. But that doesn't stop me being interested in a topic that I've been pursuing off and on for about 15 years.

Would you twitter if it didn't require a screen, sitting, keyboard, etc? What if it was as mobile and ambient as you are? (and as I suspect the technology will be in 10 years or less)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

So, I didn't see your last post, but I signed up to Twitter, although I can't actually say I use it much, mostly because I don't have many connections there.

[catness.livejournal.com]

What's the point? I guess as an "artist" I come from the perspective of, "If I don't have anything to say, why would I say it?" I don't need to broadcast just for the sake of broadcasting. I am just Not That Interesting. And neither are the one-liners of most everybody else.

[drwex]

Nod. That's the point of the phatic function: we communicate not to convey a (particular) message but rather because we can. The standard example is people reflexively saying "how you doing" when in fact they don't want a report on how you are. I do a similar thing, but with touch - when I pass through a space of friends I'll often casually touch people as a way of saying "I recognize and appreciate your closeness in physical space."

Clearly Twitter isn't intended for the communication of deep serious thoughts. It's about awareness (or so goes the claim).

[srl.livejournal.com]

I don't have time for Twitter, and I'm avoiding it in an attempt to keep the ADD-aggravating stimuli at bay. It intrigues me, but without a critical mass of my friends using it, I don't see much of a point.

[drwex]

Exactly

[okelle.livejournal.com]

It's an analogy. There's no resemblance between potatoes and the South China Sea, but I'm sure you could still come up with an analogy that includes them both.

[drwex]

Oh c'mon. The point of an analogy is to illustrate a connection or relationship. A is to B as C is to D says that there's something the same about A and B and a roughly similar relationship is true for C and D, right?

The overlap of LJ and serious journalism is the null set. You can't make an analogy on that basis, can you?

[okelle.livejournal.com]

Analogies point to the relationship between two things; the two sides of the analogy do not have to have anything at all in common. Blogging is to serious journalism as newsgroups debates are to international diplomacy. See? Analogy points out the relationship (or lack thereof). The A and C have nothing in common with one another. Doesn't make the analogy invalid.

[drwex]

Well, yes, but I was asserting that A-B had no relationship (LJ posts and serious journalism) not that A-C had no relationship.