Tag Archives: twitter

What if failure is the plan?

I’ve been thinking a lot about failure lately. Failure comes in many forms, but I’m especially interested in situations in which people *perceive* something as failing (or about to fail) and the contestations over failure that often arise in such situations. Given this, it’s hard not to be fascinated by all that’s unfolding around Twitter. At this point in the story of Musk’s takeover, there’s a spectrum of perspectives about Twitter’s pending doom (or lack thereof). But there’s more to failure than the binary question of “will Twitter fail or won’t it?” Here’s some thoughts on how I’m thinking about the failure question…

A kid covered in dirt with a face in shock — 8633780 © Andrey Kiselev

1. Failure of social media sites tends to be slow then fast.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time in the aughts trying to understand the rise and fall of social network sites like Friendster and MySpace. I noticed something fascinating. If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.

With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

A gravestone for MySpace — Flickr: Carla Lynn Hall

On a different project, I was talking with a cis/hetero dating site that was struggling with fraud. Many of its “fake” accounts were purportedly “women” but they were really a scam to entice people into paying for a porn site. But when the site started removing these profiles, they found that the site as a whole was unraveling. Men didn’t like these fake women, but their profiles enticed them to return. Moreover, attractive women saw these profiles and felt like it was a site full of people more attractive than them so they came. When the fake women disappeared, the real women disappeared. And so did the men.

Network effects intersect with perception to drive a sense of a site’s social relevance and interpersonal significance.

I don’t have access to the Twitter social graph these days, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that it would indicate whether or not the site was on a trajectory towards collapse. We are certainly seeing entire sub-networks flock to Mastodon, but that’s not as meaningful as people might think because of the scale and complexity of the network graph. You can lose whole segments and not lose a site. However, if those departing are creating Swiss cheese into the network graph, then I would worry.

The bigger question concerns those emotionally sticky nodes. What constitutes a “can’t be missed” account or post varies. What draws someone to a service like Twitter varies. For some, it is the libidinal joy of seeing friends and community, the posts that provide light touch pleasure and joy. For others, it’s a masochistic desire for seeing content that raises one’s blood pressure. Still others can’t resist the drama of a train wreck.

The funny thing about Twitter’s feed algorithms is that they were designed to amplify the content that triggered the most reaction, those emotionally sticky posts. This is why boring but informative content never has a chance against that which prompts fury. But it also means that we’re all watching how our little universe of content is changing (or not). Are you still seeing the things that give you pleasure? Or just the stuff that makes you angry? Why can’t you resist looking away from the things that give you pain? (That question isn’t a new one… it’s the question that underlies our toxic social media ecology more generally.)

I have to give Musk and gang some credit for knowing that drama brings traffic. The drama that unfolds in the World Cup is wholesome compared to the drama of watching public acts of humiliation, cruelty, and hate. We’re in a modern day Coliseum watching a theater of suffering performed for the king under the rubric of “justice.” And just like the ancient Romans, we can’t look away.

But how long can the spectacle last? Even the Roman Empire eventually collapsed, but perhaps the theater of the absurd can persist for a while. Still, there are other factors to consider.

2. Failure can be nothing more than a normal accident that tears down the infrastructure.

Nearly everyone I talk with is surprised that the actual service of Twitter is mostly still working. What that says to me is that the engineering team was far more solid than I appreciated. Any engineering team worth its salt is going to build redundancy and resilience into the system. Exceptions that are thrown should be caught and managed. But that doesn’t mean that a system can persist indefinitely without maintenance and repair.

Think of it in terms of a house. If you walk away from your home for a while, the pipes will probably keep working fine on their own. Until a big freeze comes. And then, if no one is looking, they’ll burst, flood the house, and trigger failure after failure. The reason for doing maintenance is to minimize the likelihood of this event. And the reason to have contingencies built in is to prevent a problem from rippling across the system.

What happens when Twitter’s code needs to be tweaked to manage an iOS upgrade? Or if a library dependency goes poof? What happens when a security vulnerability isn’t patched?

One interesting concept in organizational sociology is “normal accidents theory.” Studying Three Mile Island, Charles Perrow created a 2×2 grid before b-schools everywhere made this passé.

Charles Perrow’s 2-by-2 described in text, with examples.

One axis represented the complexity of interactions in a system; the other axis reflected the “coupling” of a system. A loosely coupled system has little dependencies, but a tightly coupled system has components that are highly dependent on others. Perrow argued that “normal accidents” were nearly inevitable in a complex, tightly coupled system. To resist such an outcome, systems designers needed to have backups and redundancy, safety checks and maintenance. In the language of computers, resilience requires having available “buffer” to manage any overflow.

Having dozens of engineers working around the clock to respond to crises can temporarily prevent failure. But those engineers will get tired, mistakes will happen, and maintenance will get kicked down the road. Teams need buffer as much as systems do.

I’m concerned about the state of the team at Twitter, not just because so many people were laid off. If my hunch is right, many of the engineers who are keeping Twitter going fall into four groups. There are immigrants on H1Bs who are effectively indentured servants, many of whom would leave if they could, but the industry is falling apart which makes departures unlikely. There are also apolitical engineers who need a job and there are few jobs to be found in the industry right now. Neither of these groups will want to drive themselves to the bone in the long term. Then there are Musk fanboys who want to ride this rollercoaster for whatever personal motivation. And there are goons on loan from other public companies that Musk owns. (Side note: how how how is it legal for Musk to use employees from public companies for his private project!?!? Is this something that the Delaware courts are going to influence?)

In the early days of Twitter, moments of failure were celebrated with a Fail Whale, the iconic image that Twitter posted when something went terribly awry in the system, requiring it to be shut down and, effectively, rebooted. It’s been a long time since we saw the Fail Whale because there was a strong infrastructure team who worked to bake resilience into the system. In other words, Twitter grew up.

How long can the resilience of the system allow it to keep functioning? It could be quite a while. But I also can’t help but think of a video I saw years ago about what would happen to New York City if the humans suddenly disappeared overnight. First the pipes burst and the rats invaded. But without humans leaving behind trash, the rats eventually died. The critters that remained? The cockroaches of course.

3. Failure is entangled with perception.

If you searched for “miserable failure” (or even just “failure”) on September 29, 2006, the first result was the official George W. Bush biography. This act of “Google bombing” made the internet lol. But it also hinted at a broader dynamic related to failure. There are failures that everyone can agree are failures (e.g. the explosion of the Challenger), but most failures are a matter of perception.

Politicians, policies, companies, and products are often deemed a “failure” rhetorically by those who oppose them, regardless of any empirical measure one might use. George W. Bush was deemed a failure by those who were opposed to his “War on Terrorism.” Declaring something a failure is a way to delegitimize it. And when something is delegitimized, it can become a failure.

Glasses that turn colorful tulips into black-and-white. A commentary on perception. — Photo 182315403 © mariavonotna

I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

Perception (including racism and classism) have shaped the social media landscape since the beginning.

A lot has changed about our news media ecosystem since 2007. In the United States, it’s hard to overstate how the media is entangled with contemporary partisan politics and ideology. This means that information tends not to flow across partisan divides in coherent ways that enable debate. In general, when journalists/advocates/regular people on the left declare conservative politicians/policies to be failures, this has little impact on the right because it is actively ignored by the media outlets consumed by those on the right. But interestingly, when journalists/advocates/regular people on the right declare progressive politicians/policies to be failures, both mainstream media and the left obsessively amplify falsehoods and offensive content in an attempt to critique and counteract them. (Has anyone on the left managed to avoid hearing about the latest round of celebrity anti-Semitism?)

I’m especially fascinated by how the things that are widely deemed failures are deemed failures for different reasons across the political spectrum. Consider the withdrawal in Afghanistan. The right did a fantastic job of rhetorically spinning this as a Biden failure, while the left criticized aspects of the mission. This shared perception of failure landed in the collective public consciousness; there was no need to debate why individual groups saw it as failure. Of course, this also meant that there was no shared understanding of what led to that point, no discussion of what should’ve been done other than it should’ve been done better. Perceptions of failure don’t always lead to shared ideas of how to learn from these lessons.

The partisan and geopolitical dimensions of perception related to Twitter are gobsmacking. Twitter has long struggled to curb hate, racism, anti-Semitism, transphobia, and harassment. For a long time, those on the right have labeled these efforts censorship. Under the false flag of freedom of speech, the new Twitter has eradicated most safeguards, welcoming in a new era of amplified horrors, with the news media happily covering this spectacle. (This is what led Joan Donovan and I to talk about the importance of strategic silence.)

Musk appears to be betting that the spectacle is worth it. He’s probably correct in thinking that large swaths of the world will not deem his leadership a failure either because they are ideologically aligned with him or they simply don’t care and aren’t seeing any changes to their corner of the Twitterverse.

He also appears to believe that the advertising community will eventually relent because they always seem to do so when an audience is lingering around. And with a self-fashioned Gladiator torturing his enemies for sport in front of a live audience, there are lots of dollars on the table. Musk appears convinced that capitalistic interests will win out.

So the big question in my mind is: how effective will the perception that Twitter is failing be in the long run, given how it is not jumping across existing ideological divisions? Perception of failure can bring about failure, but it doesn’t always. That’s the story of many brands who resist public attacks. Perception of failure can also just fade into the background, reifying existing divisions.

Of course, a company needs money and the only revenue stream Twitter has stems from advertising. This is one of the reasons that activism around the advertisers matters. If advocates can convince advertisers to hold out, that will starve a precarious system. That is a tangible way to leverage perception of failure. Same can be said if advocates manage to convince Apple or Google to de-list. Or if perception can be leveraged into court fights, Congressional battles, or broader policy sanctions. But right now, it seems as though perception has gotten caught in the left/right cultural war that is unfolding in the United States.

4. Failure is an end state.

There are many ways in which the Twitter story could end, but it’s important to remember that most companies do eventually end (or become unrecognizable after 100+ years). The internet is littered with failed companies. And even though companies like Yahoo! still have a website, they are in a “permanently failing” status. Most companies fail when they run out of money. And the financials around Twitter are absurd. As a company, it has persisted almost entirely on a single profit stream: advertising. That business strategy requires eyeballs. As we’ve already witnessed, a subscription plan for salvation is a joke.

The debt financing around Twitter is gob-smacking. I cannot for the life of me understand what the creditors were thinking, but the game of finance is a next level sport where destroying people, companies, and products to achieve victory is widely tolerated. Historical trends suggest that the losers in this chaos will not be Musk or the banks, but the public.

For an anchor point, consider the collapse of local news journalism. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry. There was no configuration in which local news was going to survive, no magical upwards trajectory of revenue based on advertising alone. If it weren’t for Craigslist and Google, the financiers would’ve squeezed these enterprises for a few more years, but the end state was always failure. Failure was the profit strategy for the financiers. (It still boggles my mind how many people believe that the loss of news journalism is because of internet advertising. I have to give financiers credit for their tremendous skill at shifting the blame.)

I highly doubt that Twitter is going to be a 100-year company. For better or worse, I think failure is the end state for Twitter. The question is not if but when, how, and who will be hurt in the process?

Right now, what worries me are the people getting hurt. I’m sickened to watch “journalists” aid and abet efforts to publicly shame former workers (especially junior employees) in a sadistic game of “accountability” that truly perverts the concept. I’m terrified for the activists and vulnerable people around the world whose content exists in Twitter’s databases, whose private tweets and DMs can be used against them if they land in the wrong hands (either by direct action or hacked activity). I’m disgusted to think that this data will almost certainly be auctioned off.

Frankly, there’s a part of me that keeps wondering if there’s a way to end this circus faster to prevent even greater harms. (Dear Delaware courts, any advice?)

No one who creates a product wants to envision failure as an inevitable end state. Then again, humans aren’t so good at remembering that death is an inevitable end state either. But when someone doesn’t estate plan, their dependents are left with a mess. Too many of us have watched the devastating effects of dementia and, still, few of us plan for all that can go wrong when our minds fall apart and we lash out at the ones we love. Few companies die a graceful death either. And sadly, that’s what I expect we’re about to see. A manic, demented creature hurting everyone who loved it on its way out the door.

Closing Thoughts

I’m not omniscient. I don’t know where this story ends. But after spending the last few years obsessing over what constitutes failure, I can’t help but watch this situation with a rock in my stomach.

Failure isn’t a state, but a process. It can be a generative process. After all, some plants only grow after a forest fire. (And yes, yes, tech is currently obsessed with “fail fast.” But frankly, that’s more about a status game than actually learning.)

Failure should not always be the end goal. There’s much to be said about the journey, about living a worthy life, about growing and learning and being whole. Yet, what keeps institutions, systems, companies, and products whole stems from how they are configured within a network of people, practices, and perception. Radical shifts in norms, values, and commitments can rearrange how these networks are configured. This is why transitions are hard and require a well-thought through strategy to prevent failure, especially if the goal is to be whole ethically.

Watching this situation unfold, a little voice keeps nagging in my head. How should our interpretation of this situation shift if we come to believe that failure is the desired end goal? There’s a big difference between a natural forest fire and one that stems from the toxic mixture of arson and climate change.

An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media

In the days that followed Andrew Watts’ “A Teenager’s View on Social Media written by an actual teen” post, dozens of people sent me a link. I found myself getting uncomfortable and angry by the folks who are pointing me to this. I feel the need to offer my perspective as someone who is not a teenager but who has thought about these issues extensively for years.

Almost all of them work in the tech industry and many of them are tech executives or venture capitalists. The general sentiment has been: “Look! Here’s an interesting kid who’s captured what kids these days are doing with social media!” Most don’t even ask for my interpretation, sending it to me as though it is gospel.

We’ve been down this path before. Andrew is not the first teen to speak as an “actual” teen and have his story picked up. Every few years, a (typically white male) teen with an interest in technology writes about technology among his peers on a popular tech platform and gets traction. Tons of conferences host teen panels, usually drawing on privileged teens in the community or related to the organizers. I’m not bothered by these teens’ comments; I’m bothered by the way they are interpreted and treated by the tech press and the digerati.

I’m a researcher. I’ve been studying American teens’ engagement with social media for over a decade. I wrote a book on the topic. I don’t speak on behalf of teens, but I do amplify their voices and try to make sense of the diversity of experiences teens have. I work hard to account for the biases in whose voices I have access to because I’m painfully aware that it’s hard to generalize about a population that’s roughly 16 million people strong. They are very diverse and, yet, journalists and entrepreneurs want to label them under one category and describe them as one thing.

Andrew is a very lucid writer and I completely trust his depiction of his peer group’s use of social media. He wrote a brilliant post about his life, his experiences, and his interpretations. His voice should be heard. And his candor is delightful to read. But his analysis cannot and should not be used to make claims about all teenagers. I don’t blame Andrew for this; I blame the readers — and especially tech elites and journalists — for their interpretation of Andrew’s post because they should know better by now. What he’s sharing is not indicative of all teens. More significantly, what he’s sharing reinforces existing biases in the tech industry and journalism that worry me tremendously.

His coverage of Twitter should raise a big red flag to anyone who has spent an iota of time paying attention to the news. Over the last six months, we’ve seen a phenomenal uptick in serious US-based activism by many youth in light of what took place in Ferguson. It’s hard to ignore Twitter’s role in this phenomenon, with hashtags like #blacklivesmatter and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown not only flowing from Twitter onto other social media platforms, but also getting serious coverage from major media. Andrew’s statement that “a lot of us simply do not understand the point of Twitter” should raise eyebrows, but it’s the rest of his description of Twitter that should serve as a stark reminder of Andrew’s position within the social media landscape.

Let me put this bluntly: teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background. Let me repeat that for emphasis.

Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background.

The world of Twitter is many things and what journalists and tech elites see from Twitter is not even remotely similar to what many of the teens that I study see, especially black and brown urban youth. For starters, their Twitter feed doesn’t have links; this is often shocking to journalists and digerati whose entire stream is filled with URLs. But I’m also bothered by Andrew’s depiction of Twitter users as first and foremost doing so to “complain/express themselves.” While he offers other professional categorizations, it’s hard not to read this depiction in light of what I see in low-status communities and the ways that privileged folks interpret the types of expression that exists in these communities. When black and brown teens offer their perspective on the world using the language of their community, it is often derided as a complaint or dismissed as self-expression. I doubt that Andrew is trying to make an explicitly racist comment here, but I want to caution every reader out there that critiques of youth use of Twitter are often seen in a negative light because of the heavy use by low-status black and brown youth.

Andrew’s depiction of his peers’ use of social media is a depiction of a segment of the population, notably the segment most like those in the tech industry. In other words, what the tech elite are seeing and sharing is what people like them would’ve been doing with social media X years ago. It resonates. But it is not a full portrait of today’s youth. And its uptake and interpretation by journalists and the tech elite whitewashes teens practices in deeply problematic ways.

I’m not saying he’s wrong; I’m saying his story is incomplete and the incompleteness is important. His commentary on Facebook is probably the most generalizable, if we’re talking about urban and suburban American youth. Of course, his comments shouldn’t be shocking to anyone at this point (as Andrew himself points out). Somehow, though, declarations of Facebook’s lack of emotional weight with teens continues to be front page news. All that said, this does render invisible the cultural work of Facebook in rural areas and outside of the US.

Andrew is very visible about where he stands. He’s very clear about his passion for technology (and his love of blogging on Medium should be a big ole hint to anyone who missed his byline). He’s also a college student and talks about his peers as being obviously on path to college. But as readers, let’s not forget that only about half of US 19-year-olds are in college. He talks about WhatsApp being interesting when you go abroad, the practice of “going abroad” is itself privileged, with less than 1/3 of US citizens even holding passports. Furthermore, this renders invisible the ways in which many US-based youth use WhatsApp to communicate with family and friends who live outside of the US. Immigration isn’t part of his narrative.

I don’t for a second fault Andrew for not having a perspective beyond his peer group. But I do fault both the tech elite and journalists for not thinking critically through what he posted and presuming that a single person’s experience can speak on behalf of an entire generation. There’s a reason why researchers and organizations like Pew Research are doing the work that they do — they do so to make sure that we don’t forget about the populations that aren’t already in our networks. The fact that professionals prefer anecdotes from people like us over concerted efforts to understand a demographic as a whole is shameful. More importantly, it’s downright dangerous. It shapes what the tech industry builds and invests in, what gets promoted by journalists, and what gets legitimized by institutions of power. This is precisely why and how the tech industry is complicit in the increasing structural inequality that is plaguing our society.

This post was originally published to The Message at Medium on January 12, 2015

“Pep Rally” – a truly exogenous trending topic on Twitter

Logging onto Twitter to check out a few things quickly before running off to a homecoming football game, I couldn’t help but notice something important: “Pep Rally” was trending as a US trending topic. I immediately clicked on through and found countless teens commenting on their school pep rallies. These teens were posting about pep rallies that were happening at different schools across the east coast. The fact that teens are on Twitter still comes as a surprise to some but what surprised me about this trending topic is that it’s the first truly exogenous trending topic I’ve seen teenagers produce.

There are two types of trending topics on Twitter: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous TTs happen when a topic has a viral spread. Once it becomes a TT, everyone jumps onto it to spread it even further. So when we see a hashtag like #intenyears we know it didn’t happen naturally. It spread by a group of people until it became a TT and then off it went. Most highly visible teen participation centers on endogenous TTs. Sure, there are lots of tweens who like Justin Bieber but he trends on Twitter because people actively work to make that topic (or a related hashtag) trend. Exogenous TTs happen when everyone is talking about the same thing simultaneously, not really responding to each other or to the trending topic per say but responding to a cultural moment. This often happens when there are major new events or TV shows that are broadcasting something of great interest. For example, when Michael Jackson died, Twitter users were talking about MJ not because the topic was hott on Twitter but because it was simply of great public interest. Same with teens responding to events happening at the Teen Choice Awards.

So then why am I so enamored with “pep rally” as a trending topic? It’s Friday in the middle of October. A lot of high schools will have homecoming games tonight. Whenever there’s a homecoming game in the States (and often for other games too), there are pep rallies at the end of the school day. Schools typically let out around 2.30PM. So around 3PM, I login to Twitter and voila, Pep Rally is a trending topic. Click on through and there are thousands of teens from all over the east coast (because time zones haven’t shifted yet) talking about having just gotten out of the pep rally. Some were talking about it being lame; others were talking about it being awesome. But they weren’t talking about the same pep rally. They were talking about their individual schools’ pep rallies. Collectively, many teenagers are experiencing pep rallies right now, but it’s not the same event that they’re experiencing. They’re talking about pep rallies, but what they’re referring to isn’t a shared event. Collectively, their discussions are trending. It’s a fascinating exogenous trending topic that isn’t even about the same event but rather about an activity that teens across EST (and now CST) are experiencing simultaneously but not coherently. Thus, the TT is more about marking a pattern of day (like “good night”) than a particular event. And, in this case, an event that is wholly teen-centric. And now, as I finish this post, I can see the pep rallies finish in CST and start in MST. Amazing. And delightful.

OK… enough talking about pep rallies. It’s time to go get ready for the homecoming games of the night. Hopefully I’ll wear the right colors this time. (I’m really not good at color coordinating for football games.)

spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective

Last week, I gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo. From my perspective, I did a dreadful job at delivering my message. Yet, the context around my talk sparked a broad conversation about the implications of turning the backchannel into part of the frontchannel. In the last week, I’ve seen all sorts of blog posts and tweets and news articles about what went down. At this point, the sting has worn off and I feel that it would be responsible to offer my own perspective of what happened.

First, context. Web2.0 Expo is an expensive conference filled with all sorts of webby types, entrepreneurs, and business folks interested in technological development. It’s a conference known for great talks by high profile people. Most of the talks are pretty conversational in nature – there are plenty of staged interviews and casual presentations.

Because of the high profile nature of Web2.0 Expo, I decided to write a brand new talk. Personally, I love the challenge and I get bored of giving the same talk over and over and over again. Of course, the stump speech is much more fluid, much more guaranteed. But new talks force folks to think differently and guarantee that I target those who hear me talk often and those who have never seen me talk before.

A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn’t actually realize this because scanning between my computer and the audience is usually pretty easy. So it doesn’t look like I’m reading. But without a laptop on stage, I have to rely on paper. I pushed back, asked to get my notes on the screen in front of me, but was told that this wasn’t going to be possible. I was told that I was going to have a podium. So I resigned to having a podium. Again, as an academic, I’ve learned to read from podiums without folks fully realizing that I am reading.

When I showed up at the conference, I realized that the setup was different than I imagined. The podium was not angled, meaning that the paper would lie flat, making it harder to read and get away with it. Not good. But I figured that I knew the talk well enough to not sweat it.

I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I didn’t know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn’t get to see the talks by the previous speakers so I didn’t know anything about what was going up on the screen.

When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. The only person I could see in the “audience” was James Duncan Davidson who was taking photographs. Otherwise, it was complete white-out. Taken aback by this, my talk started out rough.

Now, normally, I get into a flow with my talks after about 2 minutes. The first two minutes are usually painfully rushed and have no rhythm as I work out my nerves, but then I start to flow. I’ve adjusted to this over the years by giving myself 2 minutes of fluff text to begin with, content that sets the stage but can be ignored. And then once I’m into a talk, I gel with the audience. But this assumes one critical thing: that I can see the audience. I’m used to audiences who are staring at their laptops, but I’m not used to being completely blinded.

Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with. I didn’t know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of everyone’s attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation. I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to spare.

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Yes, I cried. Yes, I left Web2.0 Expo devastated. I hate giving a bad talk but I also felt like I was being laughed at. People tried to smooth it over, to tell me that I was OK, that it wouldn’t matter, that they liked the talk. But no amount of niceness from friends or strangers could make up for the 20 minutes in which I was misinterpreting the audience and berating myself. Nothing the audience could say could make up for what I was thinking about myself while on stage. So I went for a massage. And I spent 90 minutes trying to tell myself that I am a lovable creature. And when that wasn’t working, I told myself to suck it up and deal. I knew that if I could convince myself to look like everything was OK that eventually I would believe it. Or at least that it would all go away.

Being on stage involves raw emotions. I have never gotten over the rawness of it all. I no longer vomit before every talk (although I used to) but my stomach does try to do the macarena. Or, more likely, the ridiculous dance done by 80s hair bands as they thrash about. I can’t eat before I give a talk. And I visit the bathroom a bazillion times. Even when I’m brilliant on stage, I’m nervous as hell. But it’s also emotionally and physically exhausting. I walk off the stage high as a kite and then, two hours later, crash. Giving talks drains me. It’s brutal to try to publicly convey information, to be the center of attention. I much much much prefer to be the one observing than the one speaking. But I feel like giving talks is important. So I speak. But it ain’t easy. And so when I walk off a stage not feeling invigorated, all I get is the raw drain, the gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling of pure misery. 20 minutes of being punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, and the shameful sensations one gets when one is forced to watch a Lars von Trier film. That’s how I felt at Web2.0 Expo.

So…. the Backchannel?

Now that you’ve been forced to read my inner neuroses on public display, let’s talk about making the backchannel the frontchannel. First off, let’s be clear: I could not and did not see the Twitter stream from stage. Nothing was conveyed to me until the end. The stream was not a way for the audience to communicate to the speaker, but for the audience to communicate with itself. Lots of folks have talked about making the stream available to the speaker. Have any of you seen ustream? This is filled with “speakers” reading the stream and it’s very choppy. There’s no way that a speaker can simultaneously consume a stream and convey a message. Sure, a message every 30 seconds or so, no problem. But a stream? No way. And certainly not a long message… and, on stage, 140 characters is long.

Let me highlight a comment that Dan from HonestlyKid.net left on my blog earlier this week:

It seems that the more subtle the speaker’s point, the more impatient and nasty the audience became. While it’s easy enough to blame the new tech in the room for this shoddy behavior, I’m not sure we’re seeing anything new at all here. It certainly didn’t feel new to me from where I sat. Consider the recent Town Hall meetings around health care – substantive discussions of important issues were subsumed in cat calls and shouted rumors.

That said, having participated in this bad behavior, I noticed something else about the way it felt to put something on that wall. The twitterwall subverted twitter’s more symmetric conversation model of communication. Posting to the wall was like creating and sharing a public secret about the speaker (a little like political grafiti except it wasn’t anonymous).

The wall made a spectacle of the crowd’s impatience and anxiety feeding on the speaker’s inability to respond. That spectacle united us not as a single group receiving challenging ideas from a thoughtful orator but as quite separate individuals struggling to listen, read, respond, and make sense of the event. We moved from web conference to twitter circus.

I think that Dan nailed it. I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There’s a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there’s a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I’m trying to convey in a more standard one. And there’s no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That’s the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn’t want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can’t multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can’t ignore, that I can’t control. And that I cannot even see.

Now, I’m AOK with not having complete control of the audience during a talk, but it requires a fundamentally different kind of talk. That was not what I prepared for at all. Had I known about the Twitter stream, I would’ve given a more pop-y talk that would’ve bored anyone who has heard me speak before and provided maybe 3-4 nuggets of information for folks to chew on. It would’ve been funny and quotable but it wouldn’t have been content-wise memorable. Perhaps that would’ve made more sense? Realistically though, those kinds of talks bore me at this point. So I probably would’ve opted not to give a talk at all. Perhaps I’m not the kind of speaker you want if you want a Twitter stream? But regardless, what I do know is that certain kinds of talks do not lend themselves to that kind of dynamic. I would *NEVER* have given my talk on race and class in such a setting. I shudder to think about how the racist language people used when I gave that talk would’ve been perceived on the big screen.

Speaking of which… what’s with the folks who think it’s cool to objectify speakers and talk about them as sexual objects? The worst part of backchannels for me is being forced to remember that there are always guys out there who simply see me as a fuckable object. Sure, writing crass crap on public whiteboards is funny… if you’re 12. But why why why spend thousands of dollars to publicly objectify women just because you can? This is the part that makes me angry.

Now, I don’t mind being critiqued. I think that being a public figure automatically involves that. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin over the years, but there are still things that get to me. And the situation at Web2.0 Expo was one of those. Part of the problem for me is that, as a speaker, I work hard to try to create a conversation with the audience. When it’s not possible or when I do a poor job, it sucks. But it also really sucks to just be the talking head as everyone else is having a conversation literally behind your back. It makes you feel like a marionette. And frankly, if that’s what public speaking is going to be like, I’m out.

I don’t want to be objectified when I’m speaking – either as a talking head or a sexual toy. I want to inspire, to invite you to think, to spark creative thoughts in your head. At Web2.0 Expo, I failed. And I failed publicly. I’m still licking my wounds. But I can take the fall. I can’t take the idea that this is the future.

So I have a favor to ask… I am going to be giving a bunch of public speaking performances at web conferences in the next couple of months: Supernova and Le Web in December, SXSW in March, WWW in April. I will do my darndest to give new, thought-provoking talks that will leave your brain buzzing. I will try really really hard to speak slowly. But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I’m ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well. And if you don’t want to listen, fine, don’t. But please don’t distract your neighbors with crude remarks. Let’s make public speaking and public listening an art form. Maybe that’s too much to ask for, but really, I need to feel like it’s worth it again.

For those looking for the text of my Web2.0 Expo talk, it’s here: “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media.”

Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates

The functional act of constructing a tweet or a status update is very similar. Produce text in roughly 140 characters or less inside a single line text box and click a button. Voila! Even the stream based ways in which the text gets consumed look awfully similar. Yet, the more I talk with people engaged in practices around Twitter and Facebook, the more I’m convinced these two things are not actually the same practice. Why? Audience.

There are two critical structural differences between Facebook and Twitter that are essential to understand before discussing the practices: 1) social graph directionality; 2) conversational mechanisms.

Facebook’s social graph is undirected. What this means is that if I want to be Friends with you on Facebook, you have to agree that we are indeed Friends. Reciprocity is an essential cultural practice in Facebook (although they are trying to rip out the functional requirement as it relates to status updates, arguably to compete with Twitter). Twitter, on the other hand, is fundamentally set up to support directionality. I can follow you without you following me. Sure, I can’t DM you in this case, but I’m still consuming your updates. Yes, yes, yes, privacy settings complicate both of these statements. But for the majority of users of each site, this is the way it goes. Stemming from this are a whole lot of social norms about who’s following who and who’s consuming who’s content. It’s pretty clear that the Celebrity will get followed without reciprocating on Twitter, but there’s also a tremendous opportunity for everyday individuals to develop a following. It’s not just the Celebrities who are following different people than the people who follow them; it’s nearly everyone (except for those who think that auto-follow bots relieve social tensions).

On Facebook, status updates are placed on one’s Wall. This allows anyone else (among those with permission) to comment on the update. This creates a conversational space as it is quite common for people to leave comments on updates. Conversely, on Twitter, to reply to someone’s tweet, one produces an at-reply on their own stream. Sure, the interlocutor can read it in their stream of at-replies, but it doesn’t actually get seen or produced on their own page. Thus, a person’s Twitter page is truly the product of their self-representation, not the amalgamation of them and their cohort.

So, practices.. how does this affect practices?

Those using Facebook are primarily concerned with connecting with those that they know (or knew in high school). The status updates are an invitation to conversation, a way of maintaining social peripheral awareness among friends and acquaintances. They’re about revealing life as it happens so as to be part of a “keeping up” community.

Arguably, Twitter began this way, if only because the geeks and bloggers who were among the early adopters were a socially cohesive group. Yet, as the site has matured, the practices have changed (and I’ve watched a whole lot of early adopters who weren’t part of the professional cohort leave). For the most visible, Twitter is a way of producing identity in a public setting. This is where you see personal branding as central to the identity production going on there. It’s still about living in public, but these folks are aware of being seen, of having an audience if you will. Twitter also enables a modern incarnation of parasocial relations. Sure, there are one-sided relationships on Facebook too, but they are far more the norm on Twitter. I can follow the details of a Celebrity’s life without them ever knowing I exist. At the same time, there’s the remote possibility of them responding which is what complicates traditional parasocial constructs. Angelina Jolie could never see me reading about her in the gossip mags and commenting on her latest escapades, but, if she were on Twitter, she could sense my watching her and see my discussion of her. That’s part of what is so delightfully tempting for Celebs.

In short, the difference between the two has to do with the brokering of status. With Facebook, the dominant norm is about people at a similar level of status interacting. On Twitter, there’s all sorts of complicated ways in which status is brokered. People are following others that they respect or worship and there’s a kind of fandom at all levels. This is what Terri Senft has long called “micro-celebrity.” Alice Marwick has been extending Terri’s ideas to think about how audience is brokered on Twitter (paper coming soon). But I think that they’re really critical. What makes Twitter work differently than Facebook has to do with the ways in which people can navigate status and power, follow people who don’t follow them, at-reply strangers and begin conversations that are fundamentally about two individuals owning their outreach as part of who they are. It’s not about entering another’s more private sphere (e.g., their Facebook profile). It’s about speaking in public with a targeted audience explicitly stated.

As you can see, I’m not quite there with my words on this just yet, but I feel the need to push back against the tendency to collapse both practices into one. How audience and status is brokered really matters and differentiates these two sites and the way people see and navigate this.

One way to really see this is when people on Twitter auto-update their Facebook (guilty as charged). The experiences and feedback on Twitter feel very different than the experiences and feedback on Facebook. On Twitter, I feel like I’m part of an ocean of people, catching certain waves and creating my own. Things whirl past and I add stuff to the mix. When I post the same messages to Facebook, I’m consistently shocked by the people who take the time to leave comments about them, to favorite them, to ask questions in response, to start a conversation. (Note: I’m terrible about using social media for conversation and so I’m a terrible respondent on Facebook.) Many of the people following me are the same, but the entire experience is different.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched a bunch of self-sorting. Folks who started out updating on Twitter and moved to Facebook and vice versa. The voices they take on don’t change that much, but they tend to find one medium or the other more appropriate for the kinds of messaging they’re doing. One or the other just “fits” better. When I ask them why, they can’t really tell me. Sometimes, they talk about people; sometimes they talk about privacy issues. But most of the time, one just clicks better for reasons they can’t fully articulate.

Different social media spaces have different norms. You may not be able to describe them, but you sure can feel them. Finding the space the clicks with you is often tricky, just as finding a voice in a new setting can be. This is not to say that one space is better than the other. I don’t believe that at all. But I do believe that Facebook and Twitter are actually quite culturally distinct and that trying to create features to bridge them won’t actually resolve the cultural differences. And boy is it fun to watch these spaces evolve.

Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming?

Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.

I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth (and that of everyone you interact with) for an entire day. And then record every facial expression and gesture. You will most likely find what communications scholars found long ago – people are social creatures and a whole lot of what they express is phatic communication. (Phatic expressions do social work rather than conveying information… think “Hi” or “Thank you”.)

Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you’ve said. I think that you’ll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes “pointless babble” to a third party ear.

Twitter – like many emergent genres of social media – is structured around networks of people interacting with people they know or find interesting. Those who are truly performing to broad audiences (e.g., “celebs”, corporations, news entities, and high-profile blogger types) are consciously crafting consumable content that doesn’t require actually having an intimate engagement with the person to appreciate. Yet, the vast majority of Twitter users are there to maintain social relations, keep up with friends and acquaintances, follow high-profile users, and otherwise connect. It’s all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn’t know the person babbling. Of course, as Alice Marwick has argued, some celebs are also very invested in giving off a performance of intimacy and access; this is part of the appeal. This is why you can read what they ate for breakfast.

Far too many tech junkies and marketers are obsessed with Twitter becoming the next news outlet source. As a result, the press are doing what they did with blogging: hyping Twitter us as this amazing source of current events and dismissing it as pointless babble. Haven’t we been there, done that? Scott Rosenberg even wrote the book on it!

I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society. And what they’re doing online is fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable. They want to share their state of mind and status so that others who care about them feel connected. It’s a back-and-forth that makes sense if only we didn’t look down at it from outter space. Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don’t know and it’s bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different than you.

Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?

Now, I began this rant by noting that these kinds of studies drive me batty. Truthfully, I also have a sick and twisted appreciation for them. They let frustration build up inside me so that I can spout off on my blog and on Twitter, providing commentary that some might find useful and others might code as pointless babble.

(Tx Lior for giving me something to get worked up about this morning.)

obsessively recording and sharing our vacations

At Blogher yesterday, the issue of “addiction” emerged in the keynote. A woman in the audience noted that she twitched for the first day of vacation because she desperately wanted to tweet the things she was seeing and witnessing, like the bald eagle flying by. On stage, the conversation turned so that we talked more generally about being able to take a technology free vacation, but I want to address the tendency to tweet the things we see directly for a moment.

It seems as though humans absolutely LOVE to 1) record the minutia of their lives; 2) (over-) share the details of their experiences. And for some reason, each new technology seems to get used by people to do precisely this. I really wouldn’t be surprised if we found a cave painting that outlined what the dwellers ate for breakfast. So why are we so offended when people use the internet to do this?

Let’s talk about that vacation for a second. Why is it so wrong that people tweet their experiences when it seems to be so right that they spend their vacations stuck behind their fancy new camera recording every moment? Personally, I’m more frustrated by those trying to capture the perfect shot than those who mull over the perfect 140 character version of the event before quickly pumping it into their iPhone. Those behind the camera are far less present than those mulling over the language to express the moment. Yet, somehow, we accept one as the epitome of the vacation while the other is a rupture of it. Why is this?

Then there’s sharing. Sharing recordings of vacation events is also not particularly new. Sure, usually those who were vacationing waited until AFTER the vacation to share, but that was more a matter of practicalities. If you needed to get the film processed, you had to wait till you got home. But sharing events is a part of bonding, whether its an oral accounting of those events or a sharing of the recordings of it. One value of sharing records is the ability to share in a way that goes back to that time period.

For example, my grandfather has this brilliant album from the early 1940s when he first came to the States to train American pilots for the war. I’m fascinated by what he recorded – and what he didn’t. The album is filled with images of 1940s Georgia and Texas, young British men goofing off before facing their most harrowing hour back in Europe. (My grandfather was a bomber pilot; he lost most of his friends and was shot down himself.) What I particularly love about this album is his little drawings, the white pencil on black background that makes it clear that he put this album together to really record this period in time, a period that he thought would be his only trip to America. I can page through this album forever.

We like when people share their records. Until we don’t. Cuz we also know that there is the notion of Too Much. There are only so many baby photos you can take of a baby that’s not related to you before you scream Too Much. There are only so many home videos that you can take until you scream Too Much. And there are only so many vacation photos you can take until you scream Too Much.

Y’see… the ease with which we can record and share today means that there are too many people around us who push our Too Much limits. There was something beautiful about only being able to photograph 24/36 images on the entire vacation. I can stomach 24/36 images of anyone’s vacation. But who in their right mind thinks that I want to sift through 1000s of photos just because they were able to take them? Hrmfpt I say.

Can we please have a moment of silence for the power of constraint? Kthx. The issue with recording and sharing in contemporary society is that is far far far too easy to go overboard. This is where we struggle to find balance. Just because you can share every detail doesn’t mean you necessarily should. Just because you can record every moment of your day doesn’t mean you should. Part of the problem is that the technology doesn’t force you to think about your audience. When your mother brings out the photographs of your childhood, she can watch you squirm when you’ve had enough (usually after the third photo). She may ignore you, but she knows. But what does it mean that we are unable to see – and thus able to ignore – our audience online? When people bitch about folks sharing what they ate for breakfast, they’re noting that this kind of sharing of minutia is clearly ignorant of the annoyed audience in preference for the ability to record everything.

We keep building technologies that allow us to do what we like to do better, faster, more efficiently. The practices of recording and sharing are not new and we seem to love technologies that aid in these practices. As for vacation… well, recording and sharing vacations are also not new even if the newfangled technology allows us to do this better, faster, more efficiently. And, personally, I’m totally with the audience member who expressed the need to put away the technology (including the camera!) and be in the moment. But I should also take a moment to highlight that there are very good psychological reasons for wanting to record and share our vacations.

The processes of recording and sharing help make things “real” by expanding their significance in our lives. These are tools to aid us in building memories. We forget most moments in our lives, but when we record and share, we take the steps to solidify these memories. Vacation is a luxury and it’s (usually) filled with happy times that we want to remember. So when we record and share, we seek to keep these memories close. I cannot fault people for wanting to do this (especially in a country where people get so little vacation on average). I understand the desire to just be present on vacation, but I also understand why people are so determined to lock down these memories and contribute positive stories to the information flow of their friendships. I can’t fault them for this, even if I’d prefer that we all took a break and just enjoyed the moment. So before we mock those who are documenting their memories through the crazy new technologies, let’s also recognize that this is just one in a long line of recording and sharing tools. And, I would argue, not the most annoying one yet.

Understanding retweeting on Twitter

As we try to work out how Iranian citizens, activists, journalists, new media propagators, and politically conscious folks are using Twitter to converse about the Iranian election, we need to step back and think about some of the practices that are core to what’s taking place. One of these is retweeting, or the act of spreading a message along inside Twitter. Earlier this week, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan, and I just finished a descriptive paper on retweeting as a conversational practice:

Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter

The purpose of this paper is simple. We wanted to explore retweeting as a conversational practice. In doing so, we highlight just how bloody messy retweeting is. Often, folks who are deeply embedded in the culture think that there are uniform syntax conventions, that everyone knows what they’re doing and agrees on how to do it. We found that this is blatantly untrue. When it comes to retweeting, things get messy. The 140 character constraints introduce new dynamics and people route around a potential limitation is unique ways. But this doesn’t mean that everything is honky dory. There are authorship issues and attribution issues. The fidelity of a message often gets corrupted as it spreads, revealing the ways in which retweeting has become the modern day incarnation of the “Telephone Game.”

This paper is currently under review in an academic setting, but we’re making it available for public commentary and critique. Also, given how confused folks are in the public and mainstream media, we felt that getting this out sooner rather than later might be helpful in clearing up some myths about what’s going on. Retweeting is core to information dissemination on Twitter but how it’s unfolding is more complex than many believe.

Please enjoy! And we welcome any and all feedback!

Twitter is for friends; Facebook is everybody

I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices (in part cuz Dylan works for O’Reilly and really thinks deeply about these things). Noodling around, I asked him if many of his friends from his school used Twitter and his response is priceless:

Dylan: “as for twitter, we are totally not representative, but ya a lot of people use twitter. it’s funny because the way they are using it is not the way most do… they make private accounts and little sub-communities form. like cliques, basically. so they can post stuff they don’t want people on fb to see, since fb is everybody. it’s odd, because the way i see it get used with my friends is totally contradictory to what everyone is saying. people seem to think teens hate twitter because it’s totally public, but the converse is actually true. but it’s not everyone… probably 10-15% at most.”

As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), I find this push-back to be extremely valuable. What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it’s not broadly popular.

My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan’s friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become “public” (to all that matter) simply because there’s social pressure to connect to “everyone”?

danah boyd | apophenia

making connections where none previously existed