QotW7: Much ado about Twittering

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”


- John Donne

So speaketh John Donne, the English poet. Community is an essential part of everyday life for most people (Fernback and Thompson, 1995), and as the great poet notes above, no one man can survive by himself.

Twitter, a relatively new online social networking service, is the topic for this week’s assignment. Specifically, is it an online community? Indeed, what is an online community in the first place?

Simply put, an online community is a group of people who interact over the internet. Note, however, that they may or may not actually hang out offline, and they may or may not have started hanging out online, too. (Virtual Community, n.d.) Online communities can spring up from almost anything, and indeed, everything. Be it people talking about Singapore’s national hobby (bargain.com.sg), people talking about Singapore’s other national hobby (Makansutra forums), or gamers swapping hints (GameFAQs.com), topics and contributors are practically unlimited.

Most online communities conform to the concept of Gemeinschaft, characterized by an organic sense of community, fellowship, family, and custom, as well as a bounding together by understanding, consensus, and language. (Fernback and Thompson, 1995) This also ties into the notion of the gift economy, which was discussed in class about a month ago.

So is Twitter an online community or not?

Not really, no. In and of itself, Twitter is a little like randomly sticking Post-it notes whenever and wherever the mood strikes you. It’s not a community, in the traditional sense of the word. So, I hear you ask, what’s a community in the traditional sense of the word, then? Well, a good example would be the humble forum. In a forum, users tend to be more regular, and thus a feeling of belonging in a community often arises. (Internet forum, n.d.) Technically speaking, Twitter could still go on even if no one was actually talking to each other, just randomly thinking out loud, but a forum would just fade out and die.

So what is Twitter, then? I’d say that it’s really just another tool. It’s a tool that allows people to congregate and talk, but again, in and of itself it’s not a community. Twitter fosters communication among people, even more so than SMS or the telephone, for the simple reason that Twitter allows you to broadcast your thoughts to all your friends at once (and possibly the entire Internet as well, should you choose to do so), as opposed to SMSing them one by one, or calling each one to tell them what’s happening. Of course, nowadays you can send many SMSes at one shot and there is this thing called a conference call, but those are quite troublesome compared to just tapping that 140 characters into Twitter’s dialogue box.

Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.

As with all things, be it tech, superpowers or duct tape, Twitter does have its own Dark Side. Well, not Dark Side per se, but sort of like a downside. While roaming the internet today, I happened across this article…

Basically, people using Twitter have actually had to delete friends because they were getting swamped by messages on Twitter. And on their cellphones, because users in the U.S. have the option of getting Twitter updates as text messages (albeit for a price). At one point, a Mr. Eric Meyer was receiving 30 to 40 messages a day from this one person musing about dinner and what was on TV. I guess the moral of the story really is moderation in all things.

So in conclusion, no, Twitter is not a community in and of itself; Rather, it is a tool around which other communities can be formed. And with pretty much anything else in this world, it has its pros and cons, though with careful moderation, the pros can far, far outweigh the cons.

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References:

Fernback, Jan & Thompson, Brad (1995). “Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?" Retrieved March 15th, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Virtual Communities, n.d. In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:20, March 15th, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community

Internet Forum, n.d. In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:20, March 15th, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum