Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Twitter Struggles

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Bonnie Stewart:

Twitter is, as my research continues to show, a path to voice. At the same time, Twitter is also a free soapbox for all kinds of shitty and hateful statements that minimize or reinforce marginalization, as any woman or person of colour who’s dared to speak openly about the raw deal of power relations in society will likely attest. And calls for civility will do nothing except reinforce a respectability politics of victim-blaming within networks. This intractable contradiction is where we are, as a global neoliberal society: Twitter just makes it particularly painfully visible, at times. 

Because there is no way to win. The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective “we” treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims. As Emily Gordon notes, musing about contemporary Twitter as a misery vaccuum, the platform brings into collision people who would probably never otherwise end up in the same public space. Ever. And that can be amazing, when there are processes by which people are scaffolded into shared contexts. Or just absolutely exhausting. We don’t know how to deal with collapsed publics, full stop. We don’t know how to talk across our differences. So participatory media becomes a cacophonic sermon of shame and judgement and calling each other out, to the point where no identity is pure enough to escape the smug and pointless carnage of petty collective reproach.

I think, too, that the speed with which these social media tools are born and die makes the creation of norms around their use even more difficult. We knew the limits of paper and pen…but Twitter?

Step Away From the Tweet

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In response to this comic posted in one of our PLP communities, I left this [somewhat edited] reply:

May come as a surprise, but I continue to be skeptical of Twitter as a “conversation” platform.  From a sharing and finding resources standpoint, I totally get it. Depending on who you follow, it can be a great, great way of finding great videos, articles, news, artifacts, etc. And from the occasional back and forth social banter point of view, ok, I get that too. But I continue to find myself impatient with the extended attempts at conversation. For example, I just cannot do #edchat type of stuff due to how disjointed it feels. And frankly, there is a missing depth to any back and forth on Twitter which 140 characters just can’t convey. I wonder that if we make 140 characters the main part of the way we communicate with one another without spending some of our time in more extended give and take that we will be losing something important in the process. Is Twitter really that powerful, or is it more an easy way to enter into the “conversation,” one that doesn’t require as much time and thought and therefore allows us to check the “connected” box but leave the more difficult, more time consuming participation at the door?

Just questions. Bracing for the replies… ;0)

I’m choosing not to follow the flow as much these days. I’m posting and sharing using BigTweet, and I’m mining Tweets through search feeds, but I’m not spending nearly as much time in TweetDeck as I did in the past. Not saying I never stop by, but I’m going there less and less.

In Linchpin, Seth Godin asked “Where did your art go while you were Tweeting?”(134) And I’ve been wondering the same thing. Is Twitter our art? Really?

Release the Twounds. ;0)

#Gr8t Tweets

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Last night some edubloggertweeterwikiists launched a pretty cool idea for marking the best Twitter posts for the month of March. The idea is pretty simple; see a valuable Tweet and ReTweet it with the hashtag #gr8t. You can then either read them as they come through on this wiki page, or subscribe to the RSS feed from the search.twitter.com results page.

Used judiciously, this could be a fine way to track some of the most informative Tweets out there. I’ve been trying to keep the number of people I follow to a minimum, so for me, tapping into the best of the edutwittersphere in this way could be pretty helpful. It’s like a delicious for Twitter, kinda sorta. (It should also benefit those who follow like 10, 459 people too.)

I’ve always struggled (though not too mightily) with the signal to noise ratio on Twitter. Through the people I follow and with the varying amounts of time I spend on it per day, I probably average about half a dozen good links a day. While I enjoy the back and forth somewhat, I’m really looking for links more than anything, and I’ve been pretty successful at mining Twitter search for Tweets that contain certain words AND a link. Lots of ways to do it.

So, anyway, for next month at least, add your #Gr8t Tweets to the list…

"Ambient Awareness"

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Interesting article in the NY Times magazine section yesterday on the effects of Facebook and Twitter et. al. in terms of social awareness, friendship, and host of other aspects of how our lives are being affected by these technologies. A lot of it made me think, “yeah, that’s me,” especially parts like:

Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant…recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

It’s not all pretty, obviously, (some interesting thoughts of what this means for kids which I hope to write about more later) but what intrigues me so much about what the article brings up and about all this stuff in general is simply that it’s different, and that we’re in the midst of learning what it means right now, all together. At the end of the day, that is still the pull of social learning with social online tools for me, the fact that that brain work is transparent. Sure, I like knowing where folks are or getting some snippets of their personal lives; that adds to the picture, no doubt. But what I really like is being able to tap into the thinking of hundreds of really smart, active, engaged people who are willing to share their work and their learning with me on a scale that was not possible even five years ago. (Maybe not even two years ago.) How I manage and navigate all of that to the maximum benefit is always a struggle, but it’s a struggle that I enjoy greatly.

What I Hate About Twitter

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I’ve liked Twitter since I first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy me about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.

Whether it’s some people getting a little snippy from time to time and then other people making a way-too-huge-a-deal about it, or whether it’s two very smart people like Gary and Sheryl blowing out a Tweet-a-minute micro debate about the state of education in this country, or whether it’s people trying to live Tweet hour-long presentations that turn into like 347 updates, I’m finding anything that hints of substance just too scattered, too disjointed to read, even with the wonders of Tweetdeck. It’s like trying to eavesdrop on the conversation of a bunch of people with really bad cell phone reception, hearing a part of one response ’til it cuts out into the other. Frustrating.

And I can’t help feeling like it’s just making all of us, myself included, lazy. We’ve lamented this before, this “fact” that the whole community is blogging less since Twitter, engaging less deeply, it seems. Reading less. Maybe it’s just me (again) or maybe it’s my long term attachment to this blogging thing and my not so major attachment to texting, but it feels like the “conversation” is evolving (or would that be devlolving) into pieces instead of wholes, that the connections and the threads are unraveling, almost literally. That while, on some level, the Twitterverse feels even more connected, in reality it’s breaking some of the connectedness.

I (we?) blog for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m sincerely interested in what others are experiencing and I hope to learn from their reactions. When I write here, I can’t help but hope that whoever reads it will stop, reflect if they find it relevant, and offer up some wisdom (or whatever else) that will pique my thinking. I hope it becomes a conversation among a group of interested parties that want to test out or build on the ideas. But on Twitter, while I sometimes post silly “I ran five miles” type of check in post for anyone that might be interested, I also find myself writing for just one or two people yet publishing it for everyone to see. And when I read other Tweets directed as a response to another person, it’s like I feel compelled to click and dig and sort and try to nail down the context of the “conversation” and then to read it back again to make sense of it.

Look, I love the Tweet links and the “touch ’em alls” and the zen, in-the-moment stuff. But, selfishly, I wonder how much less I might be learning today than B.T. as more of what we care about gets processed in short soundbites.

Not sure why all that tipped for me today, but it just got really painful all of a sudden. Anyone else feeling similar things?

"Let our Congress Tweet"

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Thanks to a tweet from Andy Carvin comes this latest example of how social tools are pushing the old traditional ways of thinking, this time in Congress:

Given the rules in place, this clash between the old ways of talking to the Congress and the potential new ones may have been inevitable. Noyes says Culberson and Ryan are active users of the Internet. “They have been Twittering all over the place,” he says. “They’ve been Twittering back and forth, engaging one another in debates over politics and policy.” The reporter describes Culberson, in particular, as something of a Web maverick and a poster child for the issue.

I love it.

Student 'Twitters' His Way Out of Egyptian Jail

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From CNN:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

No wonder we take kids’ cell phones away from them in school…

Tweaking Twitter

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I’m not following all that many people on Twitter, I know, but even with the ones I do follow there are upwards of 300 “Tweets” a day, far too many for me to get to in most cases. I like following the updates when I’m online, but I confess I rarely go back and see what I’ve missed when I’m not watching the updates flow by in Twhirl. Still, when people add links to their Tweets, I usually find interesting stuff. So, I was hoping to find a way to strip out only those posts that have links in them and at least just catch up on those, preferably in my Google Reader.

And, thanks to the many answers I got to my Tweet about this, here is the way you do it, just in case you might be interested as well.

On Twitter and Balance

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Just want to note that I think I’ve landed upon an interesting little tool to remind me to take a step back and breathe every once and a while in the form of InnerTwitter. In the spirit of the Buddhist tradition, every hour InnerTwitter sends me a tweet “chime”, reminding me to pause, get settled in the moment, reflect on what I’m doing, and just slooooowww down. As someone who as attempted (and usually failed) at practicing a Zen lifestyle, and as a Twitter addict (there’s a real issue with those two ideas, I fear), it’s been kind of an interesting way of getting a little more balance in my day.

If you want to give it a try, there are three different “chime” schedules you can “follow” on Twitter. “Mindful15” (sends a chime every 15 minutes), “Mindful1PerHour“, or “Mindful1PerDay“.

I know on some level that it’s downright sad (and possibly scary) that I feel the need to resort to a regular Tweet to remind me that there are things more important in life than Twitter. (Pardon the blasphemy!) Something about any port in a storm seems to fit right about now…

Enjoy!

Or not.