[Air-L] Trivial tweeting

[Christophe Prieur]

Hi Bernie, hi all,

When i started on tweeter two years ago, 'trivial tweeting' was  
everything tweeter was about.
It was even a pain to copy/paste an url into/from the text field when  
you happened to want to do so.
Still, after a few weeks i was convinced that this new communication  
channel had a real, nontrivial point.

And a few months later (as far as France is concerned), facebook was  
there to confirm it.

My favorite example to explain it to people that tell me 'but this  
twitter thing, isn't it just for egocentric people?':
You're sitting at a café, the waiter just treats you like a piece of  
shit, you could just say loud to yourself and to whoever around wants  
to hear it (in French we have this word 'parler à la cantonade'):  
'hey, this sucker just treats me like a piece of shit!', but maybe  
you're not sure you really want to have to manage the sequel of this  
conversation teasing addressed to the people around you.
Maybe you prefer to address to the people that are *socialnetworkly*  
around you.

I'm an unbearable office mate because i always say aloud things like  
'oh great, now it works!', or 'no, i can't believe he did it again!'.   
Bernie's trivial tweets have exactly the same function, but for a  
remote audience.

So i definitely go for the 'connected presence' #3.

And yes, it's a bit egocentric, like, well, speaking to someone else...

--	Christophe.



Le 1 juil. 09 à 16:28, Bernie Hogan a écrit :

> 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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