[Air-L] Trivial tweeting

[Michael Zimmer]

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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