QotW7: Twitter Action!
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At first I have my doubts that Twitter can be a community. Because it is just too fragmented… I guess it does not enforce existing communities because you cannot surf profiles and search for friends like Friendster allows. And the emphasis is not so much on the profile than the posts. If I wish to view a stranger’s profile, I could only click on their nicks that comes up at random at the Public Timeline.
From my observation, Twitter can be an online community, however, like how we, the UB-SIM students are using—by updating their random moves or updating news or information only which we know for sure that we share; like when we have completed COM125 assignment, or the presence of events in SIM like the EA games.
Twitter has a very strong concept; it asks people to do a specific action. The focus is on what people are specifically doing right now. This topic is relative to everyday lives and easy to understand. How many of you have always thought you’re doing something really special and wants to share it with anyone, anyone at all that would listen. It could be sky-diving, killing your first pest, or finding the perfect note for that part of the music score that you always thought sounded a little out of tune. Or perhaps, finally getting down to clearing that stack of old textbooks left on the shelf since the year 1997. Unlike other social network sites, people are asked to set up profiles to personalize themselves, to give a branding to themselves. After decorating their profiles with smiley photos of themselves and their affiliations with organizations as well as hobbies and pet-peeves, users often wonder, ‘what now?’ But with Twitter, the focus is on actions, almost on the grindings of the daily life. Although it is intended to report actions, the emotions attached to situations comes naturally from humans. Therefore, humans will speak of their emotions almost as if it a natural thing to “do”. The worry that Fox (1995) has that “all this razzle-dazzle connects us electronically [but] it disconnects us from each other, having us 'interfacing' more with computers and TV screens than looking in the face of our fellow human beings" might not be a cause for worry.
The simple urge for people to communicate and share encourages them to log on and post each time they are doing something of interest or importance to them. Twitter can be interpreted with what Sennett (1977) hopes to put across: that men can act together, without the compulsion to be the same. The very act of writing about your acts links us all up together as we all act on in our daily lives. The very act of telling about your acts brings us together as a community, according to Fernback & Thompson, who says that the structural process that is associated with community is communication.
On scouring the Public Timeline, I have seen non-personalized nicks. Mainly nicks are publicly recognized as a brand, existing communities such as freshpodcasts, BBCnewsworld, googlenews, technorati, wordpress, flickr and Giovy. Also, their avatars are the logos of brands. Good news. Icons of community interests are already starting to ignite. When “followers” of these icons have round up to a number large enough that qualifies as a community, that is be when the advertisers will come in. quoting Benjamin Koe, “If you have a community, you have a business”.
References:
Social Network. (2007, March 13). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 16, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking
Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1996). "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities." Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.acm.org/%7Eccp/references/wellman/wellman.html
Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1995). "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html
Koe, Benjamin. "Public Relations and Online Communities". Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore. 13 Mar. 2007.
From my observation, Twitter can be an online community, however, like how we, the UB-SIM students are using—by updating their random moves or updating news or information only which we know for sure that we share; like when we have completed COM125 assignment, or the presence of events in SIM like the EA games.
Twitter has a very strong concept; it asks people to do a specific action. The focus is on what people are specifically doing right now. This topic is relative to everyday lives and easy to understand. How many of you have always thought you’re doing something really special and wants to share it with anyone, anyone at all that would listen. It could be sky-diving, killing your first pest, or finding the perfect note for that part of the music score that you always thought sounded a little out of tune. Or perhaps, finally getting down to clearing that stack of old textbooks left on the shelf since the year 1997. Unlike other social network sites, people are asked to set up profiles to personalize themselves, to give a branding to themselves. After decorating their profiles with smiley photos of themselves and their affiliations with organizations as well as hobbies and pet-peeves, users often wonder, ‘what now?’ But with Twitter, the focus is on actions, almost on the grindings of the daily life. Although it is intended to report actions, the emotions attached to situations comes naturally from humans. Therefore, humans will speak of their emotions almost as if it a natural thing to “do”. The worry that Fox (1995) has that “all this razzle-dazzle connects us electronically [but] it disconnects us from each other, having us 'interfacing' more with computers and TV screens than looking in the face of our fellow human beings" might not be a cause for worry.
The simple urge for people to communicate and share encourages them to log on and post each time they are doing something of interest or importance to them. Twitter can be interpreted with what Sennett (1977) hopes to put across: that men can act together, without the compulsion to be the same. The very act of writing about your acts links us all up together as we all act on in our daily lives. The very act of telling about your acts brings us together as a community, according to Fernback & Thompson, who says that the structural process that is associated with community is communication.
On scouring the Public Timeline, I have seen non-personalized nicks. Mainly nicks are publicly recognized as a brand, existing communities such as freshpodcasts, BBCnewsworld, googlenews, technorati, wordpress, flickr and Giovy. Also, their avatars are the logos of brands. Good news. Icons of community interests are already starting to ignite. When “followers” of these icons have round up to a number large enough that qualifies as a community, that is be when the advertisers will come in. quoting Benjamin Koe, “If you have a community, you have a business”.
References:
Social Network. (2007, March 13). In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved March 16, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking
Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1996). "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone: Virtual Communities as Communities." Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.acm.org/%7Eccp/references/wellman/wellman.html
Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1995). "Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" Retrieved March 16, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html
Koe, Benjamin. "Public Relations and Online Communities". Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore. 13 Mar. 2007.
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