(I love that movie). A few days ago, I revived my long-forgotten Twitter account (@andjelicaaa) and I have noticed, as I am certain many many people before me did, that I started to get followed by a pretty random people. By random, I mean strangers. So, in order not to offend them with this, I put a status update on Facebook instead (see above). An interesting conversation followed here.
[Disclaimer: Twitter, being an open system, is interpreted by different people differently; is used differently on different media platforms and at different times; and is used for different things. Which is exactly why it's so awesome.]
But talking about Twitter and who do we follow and why and how do you deal with too many people goes back to my conversation with a smart guy Michael Surtees, who was actually the one asking "how do we decide who to follow?" And also when do you jump from personal relations to social relations and use twitter more as a distribution medium than as a way of interacting w friends. For example, look at this. Adam Greenfield says: NOTE: NOT ADDING FRIENDS. PUBLIC FEED AT twitter.com/agpublic. All of this made me think a bit about social influence and actual mechanisms that we deal with filtering information. That is, without any constraints in production, promotion, and distribution of content, how do we select? And the answer is that we strangely limit our choices.
To "optimize" our choices would mean following as many people as we possibly can [which would equal the number of people on Twitter] and following what each person has to say, at every moment. But a day have so many hours, and our attention is certainly limited, and we probably do other things than stare at Twitter (i hope so). So inst
ead, we choose the most familiar option from an already highly selected pool of options - or, we "satisfice". People in fact rarely behave or make decisions independently from, well, decisions and behaviors of others. We rely on others in our choices - and that's why we choose what others have chosen. On Twitter, we usually follow the same people that our friends follow, or people that most of others follow. Call it conformism, but it's just easier.
Alan Wolk, who has a considerable number of followers, likes to follow back people he actually knows. Otherwise, it's "creepily voyeristic". Josh Kamler says that Twitter isn't about who is following you, it's about who you are following. And you are following those who you think are interesting. But how do I find those who are interesting, beyond the people I already know? I can make a list of people, of course, but that still make me stay within the already existing limits of my own knowledge - and does not necessarily help me extend it. Brian Morrissey also weighted in, and since he is a Pro Twitter with 3000+ followers, I tend to think that he knows what he's talking about. For him, it's about common interest.
I was thinking about it like this, to extend my analogy of strangers with candy. Some strangers have candy, but I don't know which. So I follow strangers that people I KNOW follow. And then, I would like to think that a collaborative filtering mechanism kicks in: if you like what people I already follow are saying, then I may also like what the people THEY follow are saying. Alan would agree - he says it makes sense to look at who your friends are talking to.
There's bigger point, tho. Even if there were a more sophisticated mechanism for finding those *interesting* individuals, people would STILL aggregate around the same persons. Which is kinda expected since we all live in communities. It's the question of social cohesion and social coordination.
Theres' something else too. It just seems to me that the technology that is *meant* to result in greater individualism in content consumption (the long tail, whatever), in fact does just the opposite: it amplifies our copying of each others' choices. It's like, forget the tail, we all want the head. How's this then different from mass media when the outcomes are almost the same? Is individual preference a myth? Example: some people are real or imagined superstars of Twitter as they have thousands and thousands of followers. Is that because they are really more interesting and talented than others, or it's just that we are simply doing what others are doing?