Micro-soliloquy, Conversation, and Correspondance
Funny video from Idiots of Ants (via.) Online “conversation” isn’t so much an exchange of ideas as it is an aggregate of micro-soliloquies. Says my friend @kilmer in under 140 characters: “Wondering if usage of an inherently self centered technology like twitter could be evidence of borderline personality disorder”
I’ve always wanted to turn my Twitter feed into a Beckett-inspired existentialist play. A mix of personal minutiae and social marketing gibberish:
- Delicious bibimbap in Kendall Sq before 5pm flight
- three important rules in content: coordinate, specialize, and know your audience http://is.gd/12u2
- drinks at 7B
- Cheapest place for car repairs in Arlington?
Says Bruce Schneier:
Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed.This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations — with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet — are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.
We know this intellectually, but we haven’t truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we’re being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.
Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. Someone in George W. Bush’s administration learned this, and millions of e-mails went mysteriously and conveniently missing.
Ephemeral conversation is dying.
Here’s a very good post about Twitter’s role in the Mumbai attack from the Berkman Center Digital Natives blog points out that Twitter isn’t good with breaking news because it isn’t designed for breaking news.
What is the point of Twitter anyway? Its a productivity tool and an email shortcut at its most essential. If I’m in NYC for the weekend, a tweet saves me from contacting several people individually. It developed as people bond over events from the historic (presidential debates) to the mundane (Top Chef). You can keep in touch easily — passively — with your favorite people who live far away.
Then there is a question of who to follow. At first I only knew about six people on the service. Two years later, I’m worried a tweet from @diablocody will bear out: “Why aren’t more moms on Twitter? It would seem to appeal to their checking-up obsession.” This means a lot more self-censoring.
Unlike Ideas on Ideas, I don’t think Twitter will die, but it will have to splinter out somehow. And it looks this is on the way in the form of Twitter Groups.
Image by Amy Cutler
“This Mickey Mouse operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks in the U.S., most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.” - Owen Thomas. Like most of you with access to a television/computer Wednesday afternoon, I was glued to the news. But soon, #Mumbai was crowded with far too cut+pastes to be of much relevance (unless one was searching by location.) It’s like how everyone will join a Facebook group for a good cause — it takes 5 seconds to “retweet” breaking news. Then, there was the bizarre back and forth over whether the Indian government was asking for people to stop tweeting “sensitive information.” If anything impressed me that night, it was the network evening news, who appeared to be the first to put it all in context.
Online Social Shaming: Twitter Users Now Trolling #lift08
Last year Kim Zetter wrote several smart articles about how outrage toward Lori Drew soon turned into out-of-control social shaming, after her name was released on the internet following the suicide of her neighbor, 13 year old Megan Meier. Drew created a fake Myspace boyfriend who “broke up” with Meier over email just days before she hung herself.:
Experts say the firestorm that followed illustrates what happens when the social imperative to punish those in a community who violate social norms plays out over the internet. The impulse is human nature, say experts, and few can imagine an offense more egregious than a trusted adult preying on the emotions of a vulnerable child. Shunning wrongdoers, especially in the absence of legal redress, helps maintain order and preserve a community’s moral sense of right — think church excommunications and the Amish tradition of Meidung.
But the drive for social shaming — to right a wrong and restore social balance — can run amok and create paradoxical consequences, especially on the internet where people instigate mobs in ways they wouldn’t do offline.
“Internet shaming is done by people who want actually to enforce norms and to make people and society more orderly,” says Daniel Solove, professor of law at George Washington University and author of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor and Privacy on the Internet. “The problem is that internet shaming actually destroys social control and makes things more anarchic, and it becomes very hard to regulate and stop it.”
Wells published only Lori Drew’s name, but her readers and other bloggers followed by finding and posting her husband’s name, the family’s address and phone number, a cellphone number, the name of the family’s advertising company, and the names and phone numbers of clients with whom they worked.
With emotions running high and the election less than two weeks away, it’s possible Ashley Todd will see the same fate. Her fabricated attack is racist, disgraceful, and will be remembered as one of the most despicable stunts in the history of United States elections. Still, a mass rush to judge outside the law could make things only worse.
While this might seem like a minor incident in politics, this is a significant event in the emerging studies of digital sociology and social media psychology. So much of the story unraveled online from her dubious Myspace page to the handwritten B so similar to that on her face, to the comments on blog posts from psychiatric professionals wondering her the carving showed “hesitation marks.”
From Reason:
This circumstancial evidence is mostly discouraging conservative bloggers who started off the evening accusing (however tongue-in-cheek) Obama of egging on the mysterious mugger. The real work is being done by local cops, who have heard multiple versions of the story from Todd (one where the mugger was outraged by her campaign button, one where he didn’t get angry until he saw her bumper sticker) and are giving her a polygraph. Still, it was the speed of bloggers that cast doubt on the story before it could even lead cable news.
Todd, as a “digital native“, has a broad Internet presence. She posted YouTube videos that seem so much like exaggerated Tracy Flick impersonations (here and here), it’s very surprising no adult supervisor intervened and suggested she take a step back, maybe sit the rest of the campaign out. It’s clear from the videos alone she is not mentally sound.
Her Twitter feed lays a whole other layer of crazy to this mess. She actually livestreamed her feigned attack. I can’t get over this. I mean, imagine Morton Downey Jr text messaging, “still scrubbing the paint off :’(” and that’s basically what happened.
It’s kinda funny to see Twitter users trolling the feed for Todd’s volunteer group lifeinthefield.com (#litf08) with comments like “Hmm, it was an okay Obama frame-job, just a few inconsistencies snagged you. Overall I’d give you a ‘B’.” streaming on the site. And there are more than a handful of LOL-able comments on the Life in the Field youtube page or on Wonkette, (Ken Layne needs to be credited as one of the first calling shenanigans on it.) But it’s only for the best if this story dies by the end of the week.
“Gunpowder paintings” by Cai Guo-Qiang
Twitter on CNN. Follow @ricksanchezcnn (or @me.)
“Little known fact: I wanted to name my last daughter ‘Algebra.’ Todd told me kids might make fun of a girl called ‘Algie.’ But why?” - FakeSarahPalin
This is awesome. Nikol Hasler, of the Midwest Teen Sex Show, is right now documenting her adventures in Walgreens and Planned Parenthood, “If I were in need of Plan B, how hard would it be to get it here?” (Thanks Audacia and Amber!)
Julian Sanchez has an interesting post about Ariel Waldman’s Twitter trolls, pointing out we use the word harassment to “describe actions that actively impinge on the victim’s space in some way.” More on spontaneous order and misogyny from RadGeek. Elsewhere, people are comparing Waldman with Kathy Sierra. The easiest way to work around it seems to be by making a user’s response feed private. As Biz Stone says, “Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.”
James Fallows’ Earthquake accounts from foreigners in Chengdu. Twitter users broke the story. You can see a live stream of Sichuan tweets on TwitterLocal. (thnx Erin.)
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
-
Sponsors
Good Books
