What if social networking and media apps such as Twitter improve our collective sense of empathy?
- When I joined Twitter I followed two types people, personal friends and complete strangers. The friends were neighbors or colleagues whom I met regularly in person. Sometimes I met them at school, others I met through other electronic media such as blogs. The complete strangers were celebrities, people whom I had heard of or read about. Usually they were people I admired for their existing online presence, say at a blog or website.
- As I continued to explore the system I started following organizations that had Twitter feeds. News sources like Minnesota Public Radio, WCCOBreaking, or the BBC. I followed them because I wanted to be stay informed about local news. I think the biggest increase in these types of follows came after the August 2007 bridge collapse in Minneapolis. At this point the number of people I followed was probably between 20-40.
- The third step in my Twitter evolution was to start following people I hadn’t met but were living close to me. I wanted to learn about the local social media networks where I am living in Minneapolis. I looked at the lists of speakers at local conferences and subscribed to their blogs or followed them on Twitter, sometimes both. Then I attended a few of the events and added people I met at the events or people who spoke on panels. Most of these people followed me back, I assume because I was local and didn’t look like a spammer. After a couple of events my Twitter following list is up into the low 90s.
I’m on the edge now of being able to keep up with all of updates posted by the people I follow. I suspect that after another doubling in my following list it will be impossible for me to read every update. I use Twitter or a client application almost every day but I don’t check it as often as other people. When I started using Twitter I set the refresh rate for Twitterific as low as I could - every 15 minutes. With almost 100 followees that refresh rate misses items during high usage periods. So I have upped the refresh rate but I still don’t check the stream that often, perhaps 2 or 3 times per hour. Unlike some users I rarely reply to other messages. I’m just not impressed with Twitter as a conversation tool for one-to-one interactions. But I was never an avid IM or text messaging user.
So what does this have to do with empathy?
At this point in time my Twitter stream is a peripheral perception of my diffuse social web (at least the part that is on Twitter). I feel like it’s become part of the background hum of my social world while I’m online. It occasionally surfaces to the front of my attention when I choose to look at it. Then it fades away as my attention shifts to another topic.
Another thing to note is that I turned off all notifications from Twitterific and other clients like Twhirl and Tweetdeck. I do this because the cost of interruptions isn’t worth it. See all the research done on information overload.
I think what is worthwhile about Twitter and other microblogging applications is the background hum. I don’t feel the need to always know what my friends are doing but I take comfort in the fact that I can find out easily when I choose to.
Entering and exiting the Twitterstream is like hovering around a party conversation. I focus for a moment on the people I am directly talking to. Then the conversation ends and I become aware of all the other conversations occurring around me. Even when I’m focused on a single person I’m still aware of others because the noise at a party never completely fades. In fact my sense of conversational focus is really an artifact of the neurological processing performed by the brain on my auditory senses. I hear everything, but pay attention to a part.
So in the online case with Twitter a parallel process is going on but slightly modified. Individual conversations are possible via replies and direct messages. Regular updates become the other conversations at the party. It’s akin to the ‘river of news’ idea popularized by Dave Winer. Updates flow by my perception and I can pay attention or not.
Twitter becomes a empathic experience when I realize that all of these people are living their own individual lives and updating me on a small stream of that activity. They face the same frustrations with software installs, server configurations, and traffic. Sometimes they are out partying, sometimes they get drunk. They get angry. Somewhere, no doubt, someone is falling in love. And soon enough someone will propose marriage to someone else on Twitter, if they haven’t done it already. Twitter puts all this emotional expression into bite sized chunks that speed by on my phosphorescent computer screen. This is “Life on the Screen” a la Turkle.
