Tagged: Social network RSS

  • thePuck 2:06 am on April 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Advertising, Breaking news, High school, Internet Relay Chat, Numbers game, Social network, Social network service,   

    Dr. Strangetwitter… 

    My social network
    Image by luc legay via Flickr

    …or how I learned to stop worrying and love Twitter!

    Twitter is an odd thing.

    Fresh new ‘in’ thing, marketing mega aid, social communication tool. Chance for conversations. Measurement of popularity. Celebrity fad du jour. Breaking news source. Avenue of connection and communication in real time.

    Target for spammers, and every damned marketing guru and get rich quick schemer around. Trap for young players. Place for the banality of human nature to play out. Competitive arena of social scale. Overwhelming influx of advertising, tedious droning, self important attention seeking, and all the worst aspects of the ‘look at me’ culture.

    So, why do I enjoy it so much?

    Well, I LIKE social media, social networking, the whole enchilada, so to speak. I have been on the web for over a decade, and I have seen it all, from IRC text based chatroom style, through the email craze, IM gains, and now microblogging the  minutae of our lives.

    I do not necessarily feel the need to detail every aspect of my life, though my tea obsession may be well known by now, but I do enjoy passing on things of interest, same as I generally do on my blog, and this includes the odd and arcane act of Retweeting.

    Retweeting involves much the same as forwarding of emails – you find a tweet (post) by a Twitterer that you like, and you forward or RT(retweet) it to your network. In email terms, that is annoying and a terrible habit – to forward everything of interest to all your friends. On Twitter, it is considered jolly good form, and renders you likely to be followed by many eager new friends.

    And therein lies the rub, gentle reader. Your new followers are not often interested in you. Generally, they are interested in the benefits of a frequent retweeting acquaintaince. Perhaps you RT an area of interest, but there are more often those who hope you will RT their meanderings also. Generally, they tend to be the marketing gurus, lifestyle coach, something to sell types.

    Now I find myself in a dichotomy of the numbers game. At first, I gleefully reciprocally followed all my new ‘fans’, excited so many people were interested in my meanderings online. Now, those numbers mock me with their hollow achievement. Any geek knows the seductive nature of popularity – once, we were the weird ones in our high school, tender, vulnerable years. Now, we are shiny, sunny, POPULAR at last!

    Yet that shimmering vision before us, is, alas, a delusion of the numbers that greet us on our Twitter home page. A mirage of popularity indeed! So my cynical side whispers to me, remove those followers! Why follow those so obviously looking to leverage of your good intentions? My chirpier side contends I do not have to RT their blandishments and advertisments, and I can remove those that bother me with too frequent and obvious sales pitches.

    What to do, gentle reader? What to do, indeed?

    Well, nothing. Nada. Zip. I am continuing the experiment, and seeing where it takes me. Judging not the reasons or motivations of those who make up mere numbers, I return to my original take on it all.

    Doesn’t matter. Really, it doesn’t. The number is just that, a few lines on a page, easily manipulated. Instead, what matters is the people who actively engage in conversations with me, or post intruiging, interesting things I can share.

    Twitter is like any other social media tool, full of traps, ego issues, personality conflicts, and huge gains to be made with intelligent and considered approaches. And pearls of wisdom amongst the dross:)

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  • thePuck 7:45 am on April 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , signifier, , , Social network,   

    “Do you see what I mean?” How a drunk-driving tweetstorm cast doubt on the solidity of the ‘signifier’ 

    Communication code scheme
    Image via Wikipedia

    Recently, I butted in on a tweetstream. A woman boasted about how she’d been worried about her drunk friend, and that she’d driven close behind her to make sure she got home safely. My retort was that if she was so concerned for her friend’s safety, why was the friend driving drunk? Why weren’t her car keys confiscated, with her ensconced safely in a cab?

    Needless to say, things got heated. She was tweeting in the USA after a long hard night out drinking with her buddy. I was tweeting across numerous timezones fresh eyed, sitting in the morning sun in South Africa.

    I softened my tone.

    Let me rephrase that. In MY opinion, I softened my tone.

    From where I was standing, I felt like I was offering the peace olive.

    That’s not what she took out of my communication. All she could hear was the supercilious, snide, judgemental haranguing of some creep on the southern tip of a continent she couldn’t even stab at on a map.

    I’ve since blocked her Twitter account. I have no interest in following the thoughts of a partygoing condoner of drunk driving.

    But heck… What if we could have aligned our meanings? What if we could have shared access to our inner thoughts? We both tried. But with varying levels of skill and intent.

    A fundamental in communication is verification that one’s message has indeed been delivered intact.

    Because signifiers — the ‘carriers of signs’, the ‘deliverers of meaning’ — are slippery beasts, they shift, and are differently understood from person to person.

    The trouble is that we tend to take our signifiers for granted. We don’t really think for a moment that the signifiers we use — our very words — might run the risk of being misunderstood. We are, after all, communicators, no? And signifiers are, after all, the pack mules of communication.

    When I say the word ‘Love’, for instance, it is a signifier that carries a vast payload. So vast that it’s unlikely you’ll understand it the same way I do. I might be issuing it as a declarative verb. I might be INSTRUCTING you to go out and love!

    You might have ‘heard’ a noun, a wishy washy, ‘Ah, love is such a joy.’ Or a vicious, ‘Love is disgusting, and causes pain and misery.’

    As the sender of a message, I trust and pray that the message I THINK I’m sending is the same one you’re receiving.

    There’s a fair amount of hard work we can do to try and encode our intent into a message. We can provide context. We can use logical thought progressions. We can ground our speech in practical, real-world examples. We can seek verification from those who receive our message.

    But ultimately, no matter how skillfully we encode our messages, the slippery nature of signifiers always eludes us. Put simply… It is impossible for you and me to calibrate our understanding so that what I grasp in the privacy of my own head matches what YOU grasp. You may SAY you get my meaning. I may even AGREE that your summary of my meaning is indeed what I intended. But the signifiers we use are too slippery for certainty.

    This puts pressure on our social media communications. As an avid Twitterer (or Tweeter, or twit, or whatever signifier you’d like to assign to the concept), I’m well aware of the power of the shifting signifier to cause great misunderstanding and anger.

    Here’s the rub. In social media, we’re confined to conveying loads of info in very small channels. Twitter gives us 140 characters to convey our message. So we use ‘lowest common denominator’ words as our signifiers. We simplify our language to fit all of our meaning in. Which means that we lose richness. We dumb down. And even so, our basic words have so much slippage that we’re misunderstood.

    I’ll try and summarize this post as a tweet:

    ‘@royblumenthal: D’ya understand what I think I said? And if so, could you lemme know what you think I said? Significant? And don’t drink’n'drive!’

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    • Michael Hafner 8:04 am on September 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      hey that a great post; I´ve written a lot about the meaninglessness of the signifier, but unfortunately most of it in german.
      the challenge with social media and understanding is not only speed and limited space, but in my eyes also the moving and changig contexts:
      if you read my book, I have a fairly good idea about what you are doing
      if you are reading my weppage, I loose a little bit of control – I don’t know where you start, how you come there, what device you use
      if you read my rss feed – I have no idea of how, when, where and what you are actually doing
      and here, it´s actually the worst and most unsecure case: I THINK I have an idea about what you said, and I THINK that what I post here should make some meaning – but shouldn’I actually get back and have a closer look on what you actually wrote? shouldn’t I try to find out more on who you are, to make sure I get your background and know in whcih context you are talking?
      On the other hand – why should I? Your existence, to me, are just a few lines of text, there will probably never be any closer encounter. So why shouldn’t I just take this, do what ever I want, understand it however I think, and not care about your “real” intentions at all?

  • thePuck 2:54 pm on April 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: #iloveyou, meme, , , , , , Social network, SteamGraph,   

    The Ultimate Meme: #iloveyou 

    Take a look at this:

    The #iloveyou meme trending on Twitter

    The #iloveyou meme trending on Twitter

    Social media trends about a lot of things. We like absurd, cute things. We like scary things. We like bacon. And we definitely like things that will make us money. But none of those things make a wave like the #iloveyou meme that has taken over Twitter. This says something about humanity and about where we are going, that this is what we unify about.

    This makes me proud to be a part of this world and more optimistic than ever. Thank you, @StaciJShelton and everyone else who is participating. You made my weekend.

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    • meme 5:07 am on December 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      nice one yea man i love the llllllllllllllove

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