Qotw7: Why Twitter is NOT an online community
I was sifting through the blog entries that were submitted for this week, and I realised that an overwhelming majority considered Twitter an online community. I can't say ALL, because I admit I didn't bother to read many, but I'm pretty sure it's almost all. So I'm going to sacrifice this week's piece to playing devil's advocate just to open another perspective. There has to be ways that Twitter falls short of being an online community, and I'm going to look for them. (If you don't think Twitter is an online community either, join me my brother in the fight against groupthink!)
Firstly, to be able to discuss whether Twitter is an online community or not, I have to specify a definition of an online community. There are many, many opinions on what defines an online comumunity. Let's explore the concept a little.
Community is a slippery and amorphous concept, but I hope we can all agree that it has to involve at least more than one individual. The dictionary definition of "community" is "a group of people... with shared interests." (Crowther, 1995) This is what we understand by the word community. Let's not argue semantics and leave it at that for now.
The idea of community is a little more complex. Cooke (1990) claims that community is a residual consequence of modernity - that an egalitarian, heterogenouos community is unrealistic because, for example, different social classes rarely associated with one another (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). He proposes that the notion of community stems from an industrial society, and that interactions within a community are functionally and geographically bounded, and based on the social division of labour. Interactions in a community are then segregated and contractually-oriented.
Cooke's theory regarding the concept of community, derived from his understanding of its origins (in an industrial society) relates to how community is idealised in today's society, as opposed to how it truly is (as defined by its roots in industrialism). This is not to say that community began only with industralisation - but we must recognise that the age of industraliasation had a significant impact on how we view and treat public spaces and our communal interactions.
Similarly, the post-industrial age's wave of new technology and communication media is substantially affecting how the concept of community is viewed. Communities are no longer restricted to the physical realm. The internet has given us what phones, television, radio, telegrams, and letters could not replace in face-to-face communication: many-to-many communication in a convenient, quick and relatively easy way. This makes the internet a viable platform for communities as they were traditionally understood to be.
Still, just being able to contact a person (or people) doesn't make the internet a community. That would be quite ridiculous. I'd like to define community as a group of people with shared interests, yes, but also such a group that has formed mental or emotional interpersonal connections, and also has established group norms - etiquette, a set of customs that have developed over time that gently regulate the group's interactions. And this week's assignment asked whether I considered Twitter to be an online community.
So here's why I don't think Twitter is an online community exactly: the people on it aren't connected. When you start up on Twitter, you don't join a community of people interacting and forming connections per se. People on Twitter post information about themselves on their own little page, not to anyone else specifically. I suppose if you're interested by someone else's page, you could begin a conversation, but then how is the whole process any different from posting an ads in the personals section of a newspaper?
A true online community would primarily have people interacting with each other, communicating and talking about issues in a relatively public space. In contrast people on Twitter talk about themselves - in a public space, yes, but the feedback tends to be many-to-one, replicated over and over so it looks like many-to-many communication. A better example of an online community would be any forum, any multiplayer-gaming group, any chatroom or multi-user chat platform (e.g. IRC).
What, then, is Twitter? Twitter is a loose network of people: a database, if you will. Like the personals section of a newspaper, Twitter allows people space to express their individuality, in a way that other people may see and take notice of. Other examples of this include Myspace, personal weblogs, and Friendster. It helps connect people, but not directly. Instead it provides a single location where people can go to to find personal information about other users, to search for users who might interest them. It is a budding ground for relationships to be formed, but in itself does not constitute a community.
References:
Crowther, J.(Ed.).(1995). Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (5th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooke, P.(1990).Back to the Future. London: Unwin-Hyman.
Fernback, Jan & Thompson, Brad (1995, May). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?. Retrieved March 17, 2007, from
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html
Firstly, to be able to discuss whether Twitter is an online community or not, I have to specify a definition of an online community. There are many, many opinions on what defines an online comumunity. Let's explore the concept a little.
Community is a slippery and amorphous concept, but I hope we can all agree that it has to involve at least more than one individual. The dictionary definition of "community" is "a group of people... with shared interests." (Crowther, 1995) This is what we understand by the word community. Let's not argue semantics and leave it at that for now.
The idea of community is a little more complex. Cooke (1990) claims that community is a residual consequence of modernity - that an egalitarian, heterogenouos community is unrealistic because, for example, different social classes rarely associated with one another (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). He proposes that the notion of community stems from an industrial society, and that interactions within a community are functionally and geographically bounded, and based on the social division of labour. Interactions in a community are then segregated and contractually-oriented.
Cooke's theory regarding the concept of community, derived from his understanding of its origins (in an industrial society) relates to how community is idealised in today's society, as opposed to how it truly is (as defined by its roots in industrialism). This is not to say that community began only with industralisation - but we must recognise that the age of industraliasation had a significant impact on how we view and treat public spaces and our communal interactions.
Similarly, the post-industrial age's wave of new technology and communication media is substantially affecting how the concept of community is viewed. Communities are no longer restricted to the physical realm. The internet has given us what phones, television, radio, telegrams, and letters could not replace in face-to-face communication: many-to-many communication in a convenient, quick and relatively easy way. This makes the internet a viable platform for communities as they were traditionally understood to be.
Still, just being able to contact a person (or people) doesn't make the internet a community. That would be quite ridiculous. I'd like to define community as a group of people with shared interests, yes, but also such a group that has formed mental or emotional interpersonal connections, and also has established group norms - etiquette, a set of customs that have developed over time that gently regulate the group's interactions. And this week's assignment asked whether I considered Twitter to be an online community.
So here's why I don't think Twitter is an online community exactly: the people on it aren't connected. When you start up on Twitter, you don't join a community of people interacting and forming connections per se. People on Twitter post information about themselves on their own little page, not to anyone else specifically. I suppose if you're interested by someone else's page, you could begin a conversation, but then how is the whole process any different from posting an ads in the personals section of a newspaper?
A true online community would primarily have people interacting with each other, communicating and talking about issues in a relatively public space. In contrast people on Twitter talk about themselves - in a public space, yes, but the feedback tends to be many-to-one, replicated over and over so it looks like many-to-many communication. A better example of an online community would be any forum, any multiplayer-gaming group, any chatroom or multi-user chat platform (e.g. IRC).
What, then, is Twitter? Twitter is a loose network of people: a database, if you will. Like the personals section of a newspaper, Twitter allows people space to express their individuality, in a way that other people may see and take notice of. Other examples of this include Myspace, personal weblogs, and Friendster. It helps connect people, but not directly. Instead it provides a single location where people can go to to find personal information about other users, to search for users who might interest them. It is a budding ground for relationships to be formed, but in itself does not constitute a community.
References:
Crowther, J.(Ed.).(1995). Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (5th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooke, P.(1990).Back to the Future. London: Unwin-Hyman.
Fernback, Jan & Thompson, Brad (1995, May). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?. Retrieved March 17, 2007, from
http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html
posted by xian @ 4:58 PM
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