[Air-L] Trivial tweeting

[joana ro]

I would agree - and see this as a larger trend which is visible also in
photography or blog comments.

Plus, what is iteresting? CNN's endlessly repeating non-news about i.e.
swine flu is not that much more interesting than what a friend had for
lunch.

On Wed, Jul 1, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Michael Zimmer <zimmerm at uwm.edu> wrote:

> I take box #3:  I see trivial tweeting as the contemporary form of
> Malinowski's "phatic communication", a speech act meant to be social, rather
> than informative.
>
> -mz
>
> --
> Michael Zimmer, PhD
> Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
> Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
> University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
> e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
> w: www.michaelzimmer.org
>
>
>
> On Jul 1, 2009, at 9:28 AM, Bernie Hogan wrote:
>
>  Dear Aoir folk,
>>
>> I had a Morton's thai chicken sandwich for lunch. Delicious.
>>
>> Pretty trivial, eh? So why do people do it? I can understand
>> retweeting 'important' or novel things: it is obviously a practice for
>> garnering attention (see danah, Scott and Gilad's new DRAFT:
>> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/06/18/understanding_r.html
>> ). But why do people tweet what appears to be trivial statements?
>>
>> In the process of norm formation on twitter, I have been privy to more
>> than a few conversations where the most common complaint about twitter
>> is that twitter is for people who want to show off everything they're
>> doing and, "I don't care what they had for lunch"; they are being
>> exhibitionistic (which is a veiled term for unwanted self-exposure).
>>
>> Any thoughts? Here's some ideas:
>> 1. People do not know what constitutes 'interesting' and they are
>> trying. (The spaghetti on the wall hypothesis - throw it all and see
>> what sticks)
>> 2. People genuinely believe they are promoting something.
>> 3. People want to make themselves accessible - mundane twitters help
>> signify a sense of "connected presence".
>>
>> Also, have you followed anyone who was a trivial twitter, but
>> ultimately stopped tweeting everything? Have you been privy to a
>> norm-reevaluation (i.e. someone complaining about a tweeter that led
>> to a change in the tweeter's behavior?). Did you tweet everything and
>> then give up because it led to more bad press than good press? Was
>> there an audience feedback in there, for example, people stopped
>> following me until I started posting 'serious' things, like
>> discussions about twitter, then it picked up?
>>
>> Take care,
>> BERNiE (@blurky)
>>
>> Bernie Hogan
>> Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
>> University of Oxford
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