Thoughts of a Twitterer

The Tweet

Tweet tweet – tweet tweet tweet

tweet tweet tweet – tweet tweet

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet

Tweet

etc.

 

The TwitteRiver

 

The cybernetic notion of the human brain working as a machine or computer shapes human behavior on the internet.  In the interaction between men and machine the two oppositions find a homeostasis within a larger system of knowledge exchange. By this Twitter can be seen as a real time flow of fun, expression, knowledge, news and messages al within the Twitter stream or ‘time line’ is experienced as a streaming flow of immersive time and space of virtual and material status. The difference of online and offline time and space blurs into a overall system of experience.  Where this flow will lead us is will get clear when experience and time will meet as we can look back on the developments that Twitter will make over time.

 

The Way We Twitter.. euh, Think.

Let us move now beyond the user relevance to a wider perspective of significance in our society. The way that information is documented can be seen as a reflection of structures in our society, as Foucault has shown in ‘The Order of Things’. Since Twitter is not arranged by the Dewey Decimal Classification as information is set by libraries or directories but by an associative manner. Will therefore Twitter teach us how to think differently? Now the mass media paradigm ended, the semantic web with its tools like Twitter reflect this shift by its use. Or is this an outcome of facilities that meet needs that previously could not be given? Twitter is the first tool where rss, newsgathering, chatting, social network and knowledge sharing is combined.  For the first time there is a tool that is open to personal use and content that is directly flow and flexible. And can be seen as a good platform for many initiatives and appealing of all previous definitions as actually something with added value. Everybody is a media outlet even now with Twitter  personal media outlet platform.

Tweet – ReTweet

Twitter analytics

Coming from the mass media paradigm a service which is in constantly changing, not fixed in form and content does not sound very meaningful. The information that is shared may even not be true or given by a reliable source at all, but does this make Twitter less meaningful or even less useful? The information may not be true, the contents are no less valuable for the information Twittered has relevance to its users. Due to the changing characteristic of Twitter and the different ways in use by its followers multiple user initiatives are created to expand the relevance in ways Twitter is used. One of my own interest is this tool to share documents, or this and this tools to see how effective your tweets are. And just for the fun of it, a small selection of nice tools.  What can we make of this then?

Click the poem for suggestions.

Twitter as a subject to different

As a Web 2.0. tool of the social web, Twitter has the characteristic of being in permanent beta, due to upgrades and user input. The way how to use it, or its purpose for the users are herewith subject to different. For user use Twitter in different ways. One of new media’s principles is variability as Lev Manovich says; ‘A new media object (such as an Web site) is not something fixed once and for all but can exist in different (potentially infinite) versions’. For him variability is ‘a consequence of discrete representation of information and its numerical coding’.  In apply  to Twitter we see tweets of various thoughts and comments connected to pictures and links. As Manovich explains ‘old media involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual or audio elements into a particular sequence. This sequence was stored in some material, its order determined once and for all. Stored digitally, rather than in some permanent material, new media elements maintain their separate identity and can be assembled into numerous sequences. At the same time, because the elements themselves are broken into discrete samples, they can be customized on the fly’. Thus Twitter is indifferent to form for it can be used in several ways. In account of Katherine Hayles this notion of indifferent can be further explained as ‘we should rethink the relationship between form and content, more specifically between the material aspects of the medium used and the generated content. In the case of the so called new, this relationship is blatantly active: new media shape their own content (since the medium is not something that is “given” once and for all, but a structure that is discovered and produced by its use and content in an infinite movement of critical reappraisal)’. In not having a definite form one can say Twitters content can seen as determined by this by being indefinite as well. But what does this mean, are tweets meaningless?

Go back to the poem for more thoughts of Twitter.

Towards a Definition for Twitter

Twitter; is it a new medium, is it a social network site, is it a RSS tool, is it a (micro) blog, is it a new form of literacy, can it be art or peoetry, is it a messenger service, is it a communication channel, is it a news platform or is it a just another bubble.com?

Click the next tweet of the poem to see what Twitter may be all about.

I am a Wikipedian

This week I posted a Wiki post on the Dutch Wikipedia website about the subject of my interest Digitized Cultural Heritage. Nothing fancy, just a small posting with some definitions and examples followed by a few links. After carefully following the guidelines to use by posting for the first time, I really liked posting my own article. It appeared to be one of the many Web 2.0. or social web experience of happiness and pink fuzzy feelings. Thoughts run through my head like ‘I am a participation of the harnessing of collective intelligence [yeah!]’. There is also another aspect of posting my entry I could really appreciate;  the knowledge and information sharing I am involved in from now on. Unfortunately this feeling did not last very long and made place for an information officer’s dilemma . ‘I am a preserver of an information overload [What have I done]’.  Apparently the information manger woke up inside of me and panicked by the sight of such large of seemingly uncontrolled and over categorized information.

That being said, I noticed that after a few hours of being online, my post got moderated and some small improvements were made by a user called MoiraMoira. The double linked footnote got deleted and the link to the book of the author I was referring to was also deleted for anti commercial and advertising policy reasons I presume.

In comparison to my classmates the adjustments were gentle, most of their postings got brutally corrected or deleted. Which makes me wonder, why did I not get kicked off Wikipedia? I did not aspect to got approved by the moderator, this comes to me as a welcome surprise. It makes me wonder what would have happened if my post would have been deleted.

Still being in my information-manager-modus I look for some answers on the net. Doing so something tells me that there should be a Wikipedia page about this subject. And indeed, as expected from a Web 2.0. mechanism, different creative spurs have been documented. Such there is the Wikipedian song list, a table of songs about Wikipedia. The one I like expresses the feeling that I can imagine when getting kicked off your entry. I find the lyrics to be quite funny as well.

These generated user contents give a great look towards the actual Wikipedia community of knowledge sharing users. There are multiple pagers of warnings on how to prevent other negative outcomes of being active on Wikipedia like Wikistress [especially see nr.82 and nr. 133]. And  to make sure a Wikipedian does not become a Wikidrop-out or a Wikiwacko these entries are the way to go.

In evaluating my Wiki entry I can conclude that the I applied to the one big criteria issue that Wikipedia is about; relevance.  As seen on The Next Web, relevance is the thing to gain in Web 2.o. land. The  subject I choose looks to be relevant for there was no information about digitized cultural heritage on the Dutch ‘Digital’ Wikipedia page, as there was no referring to cultural heritage here. Visa Versa there is no information on digitizing on the Dutch ‘Cultural Heritage’ Wikipedia page. By bringing those pages together in my entry by linking, I have shown the relation on these subjects and made a positive contribution to information network Wikipedia is.

Even the modifications that were made to my entry seem small, they do display the effort that is made  in trying to making the entry more objective in order to make Wikipedia an objective encyclopedia. Having a critical point of view though, I wonder why a Web 2.0. initiative being modern and revolutionary in its class like Wikipedia would try to be an old, cold, medium such as a encyclopedia. Can Wikipedia not turn into something new, something defined as a term to be a Wikipedia and not a reshape of the old traditional definition? I am not the only one who has some kind of critique. Alan Shapiro explains that knowledge is based in society and as such Wikipedia not only represents knowledge, but also stupidity. And what most people believe in society is based on accepted clichés. He suggests that we must separate the real knowledge from the clichés and the stupidities. And he tells us that Wikipedia is about the democratization of knowledge and the promise of popular education. Therefore we need to find balance between the consensus culture such as Wikipedia and respect for the work of the scholar who has dedicated a lot of research on particular issues. According to Shapiro a model for balancing these two contributory streams needs to be developed.

The last thing has not been said on this Wikipedia critical point of view let alone for the next meeting will be in March 2011. In the mean time, I will go and explore my new online identity as Wikimedian.