Being orijunal

Twitter networks

This week, Kirsty Allsopp told her daughter to have children before her fertility drops off a cliff. This was bad because a) she’s taking no steps to have these dangerous cliffs fenced in b) her daughter doesn’t exist c) she didn’t really say that to her daughter, because her daughter doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, the Queen travelled to give a speech in a golden carriage. You don’t really get any multiple-choice for this “debate”: you just have to point out the irony of, like, she’s talking about austerity but like GOLDEN CARRIAGE, right? Right? But then Richard Dawkins said that Cinderella’s golden carriage wasn’t real, or something, and that was WRONG too because he’s a dick.

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s really easy to join in a conversation, and feel like you’re contributing, without any original thought at all. Wait, did I say “great”?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about networks, about how messages spread, about adding value to the conversations you participate in. I hope I don’t need to explain why copying and pasting other people’s tweets adds nothing. (In fact, it actually removes something from the conversation – correct attribution of the original comment.) Many people have heard me wailing that if you’ve got time to copy, you’ve surely got time to press the RT button instead.

But, leaving aside issues of attribution, how much value are you actually adding by re-sharing things? I used to assume that there was a tiny amount of value in being a small part of a network sharing useful information/valuable insights/cute cat pictures. Now I’m not so sure.

I think the 200+ people who shared a piece of tactical voting advice before the European elections thought they were doing something useful. It’s an excerpt from a longer blog post, but someone (presumably Jack Seale) screenshotted the bit about tactical voting and posted it to Twitter as an image, meaning that you could read it in seconds and share it seconds later. (Unless you're visually impaired and using a screen-reader, in which case: tough.) The solemn advice to vote Labour in south-west England because “the Greens don’t stand a chance” must have come as a surprise to Molly Scott Cato, newly elected Green MEP for, er, the south-west of England.

More recently, people have been sharing the blog post about how gender bias makes people take female hurricanes less seriously, which is bad because sexism is bad and also a hurricane could easily blow your fertility off a cliff. But then the study turned out to be rubbish, so we all had to share the other blog post about how it was rubbish.

In lighter news, we all laughed about the UKIP “common sense” bus driving into a railway station. Some of us posted a picture of it pointing out that it doesn’t exactly look like common sense! Others posted a picture saying that they clearly have no spatial sense! Others posted the picture and pointed out that this is hilarious! It’s hilarious because of the symbolism! Do you get it? UKIP are idiots! Guys, did you hear they totally crashed a bus?

In other words, dozens of people posted the same picture on Twitter, with eerily similar comments, and were rewarded for it with lots of RTs, because laughing at UKIP is how you signify belonging to a particular tribe. I have no idea who actually took the original picture, because they got no attribution from any of the people gleefully sharing their work. But hey, at least everybody on Twitter knows that the UKIP bus crashed.

Compare this with sharing news or information in real life. Think about the number of times that a piece of news fails to spread within a family, within a workplace, within a community. Think about how often you share a piece of news with one half of a couple, only to find that they haven’t breathed a word to their partner. I’m not talking about secrets; I’m talking about pieces of personal or community news that just don’t get passed on. Maybe a footpath floods, but nobody mentions it to their neighbours, so everybody finds out separately through trying to use it. The coffee machine at work breaks, and six colleagues separately work out from trial and error that it’s broken, then separately choose not to pass this information on.

Partly this is because, as a society, we look down on “gossip”. Yes, of course we still participate in and enjoy a good gossip. Many magazines owe their healthy circulations to our shared love of gossip. But it’s gendered as a “female” activity and it doesn’t have society’s approval as a worthwhile way of spending your time. (I won’t speculate on which way round the cause and effect is.)

But re-posting someone’s picture of a bus and saying “That’s not very sensible! LOL!” isn’t gossip. It’s participation in a public discussion. It’s political comment. That means it’s worthwhile. Meanwhile, picking up the phone to tell your great-aunt that your brother is getting married...that’s just gossip. It’s not worthwhile. Yes, you are making social contact with a lonely person, and sharing news she won’t get from any other source, and cementing ties within your family, but it just isn’t as useful as pressing the RT button to ensure that at least another 20 people see the picture of that UKIP bus because UKIP, right? LOL!

Can we challenge this? Can we get past the idea that you absolutely have to share what’s already being shared and get angry about what everybody else is getting angry about? I think what I’m trying to say is:

  • where everybody is sharing, you can only add real value by saying something new
  • where almost nobody is sharing, you can add value just by sharing something

I can propose a little fix for the first one. For a month, try only sharing things on Twitter that you discovered from sources other than Twitter. Janet McKnight suggested doing this for the month of June and J-P Stacey suggested calling it Orijunal. I’m going to give it a try, even though it's already the 5th of the month.

As for the second one? No little fixes. Because it’s the real world. You’re going to have to actually talk to people.

Comments

A thoughtful post Kate, it really got me thinking. As I reflect on what you say, my gut response however, is, but doesn't it depend on what you use Twitter and other information networks for?

As I only really use Twitter, I cannot comment on other types of networks, but I do find the sharing & resharing of information on Twitter really useful. This in particular, is from my position of being predominantly a garden tweeter and follower. I find a lot of value in sharing and recieving infomation about growing, photos of flowers etc. I cannot count the number of times that someone has shared something on Twitter that has been of real use to me and that I have taken it away, used it and then maybe later shared the same information myself. I love seeing lots of photos of beautiful flowers and vegetables. To me the pleasure of this is something I value highly. People also ask questions, I have myself, and have received helpful answers from other garden Tweeters. In fact Twitter connects me to other gardeners and information in a way that I simply couldn't do so in person. 

The RTing of the same tweet can also be useful. I don't always catch a tweet the first time around, so having it RTed back into my timeline gives me information that I find useful. This might be a piece of news I missed, or a tweet about a plant of which I didn't know. I also use Lists a lot so that when there is just too much info and I have other things to do so cannot keep up with Twitter, I can go back later and check my 'friends' or 'garden tweeters' list and see what's happening. 

To me it comes down to intent. What is the intent of the person using Twitter, and is it of value to them? I can only speak from my experience of course, but I find Twitter a really good way to keep in touch with other gardeners and those kind of conversations, and to have a natter with friends. The latter became even more important to me when I moved away from where most of my friends lived as it was another way of staying in touch, along with emailing, Skype and phone calls.

It's possible my response has moved away a bit from your key point about whether there is "much value in repeating what everyone else is saying". For me, all this sharing and resharing ad infinitum can get a bit noisy, but I mostly find it useful, and enjoy feeling part of a community, whether it is a community of gardeners, people who share cat pictures or campaign groups that ask you to take action.  

I guess I'm saying that whether the sharing & resharing the same information has value or not, depends on each persons perspective. Which I guess is a droll response in the end, but it's all I have...  :)

I also will be very interested to see how your experiment goes. And I mean that in a genuine, and not in a 'ha ha as if' way.

P.S. I'm one of those boring people who always reports the broken kettle, photocopier or dangerous branches along a footpath, and left notes to that effect to inform people. I do find it frustrating that other people don't bother.

 

I (almost) always think carefully before retweeting, and what I think is "Is the set of my followers who might find this interesting sufficiently disjoint from the set of followers of the person I'm retweeting from?" And I'll only retweet if I'm confident it will reach a new and interested audience. Gardening stuff is a great example of this. It would be impossible to follow all the other gardeners who might have relevant things to say to us, so we all follow some and these form overlapping groups, and a retweet can propagate information from one group to another.

I suppose Kate's point was about how much retweeting is non-information. I'm worried that the orijunal idea risks losing the spread of helpful information as well. (I was going to say "throwing the baby out with the bathwater", but under current circumstances that is beyond tasteless.)

Hi Siôn, you've raised my own worry about being Orijunal - missing the spread of helpful information too. I've already broken my own rules since writing this blog post, then realised that I hadn't exactly made the rules of Orijunal clear in the first place.

Shani (not verified)

Thu, 2014-06-05 15:54

Permalink

Great post :) I've thought about this a lot and come to slightly different (or maybe just more convoluted...) conclusions. Although I do really like yours too. It's all a question of balance in the end!

The factors in my framework go something like:

1) Relative positions of yourself and the source of the thing you're considering sharing. Is said thing already making its way through the ecosystem or is it something you're adding to it? That could mean completely new to the entire network like you suggest, but it could also just mean new to your area within it, if it's come from someone whose readership doesn't overlap much with yours. This is going to be much more likely if you're a hub who is effectively broadcasting to lots of disparate people, vs if you only have a handful of readers who are likely to be plugged in to the same sources you're seeing something from.

In general, I'm far less likely to share something that I think people following me will have already seen. Or on the rare occasions that I happen to catch something in the early stages, that people are likely to see in a minute anyway regardless of my intervention.

That said, being more active rewards you with more followers than keeping relatively quiet does, and sharing things is an easy way to do that, so, shrug.

2) Content of the thing. I have a rule for myself that I won't RT anything no matter how tempting unless I am really confident in the accuracy any facts involved. Of course there are limits to that, such as your hurricane example, which looked reasonably authoritative at first glance until someone more expert came in and took a seriously close look at the actual data, not just the article. I'm maybe a bit too paranoid of the limitations of my knowledge on stuff like that, so for me to share something that involves any factual content it basically has to either be quite small and easily checked (like a gmail privacy setting) or be in a field I feel genuinely expert in, which is even rarer. But I know that means I don't share an awful lot of stuff which is probably totally fine, just because I can't sufficiently prove that it is fine to myself. And in doing so I miss out on all sorts of attention, conversations, etc.

Seems like inadequate fact-checking is a big part of what prompted this post, even though you then pin it on 'originality'? 

3) Purposes of sharing the thing. Sharing a cat picture to make people smile isn't the same as sharing a thing to feel smug about which isn't the same as trying to provoke outrage or anger which isn't the same thing as trying to inform or call to action which isn't the same as trying to demonstrate support for someone. I mean this is a general principle that applies to almost any action, why are you really doing it, is that a motive you're happy with, and does it actually work?

It's not really a surprise that my Twitter is fairly quiet, right :)

Thanks for this great comment, Shani. I totally agree that there's a difference between sharing something with people who are unlikely to have seen it and sharing something with a network that's already throwing it around like a Frisbee. The problem is, like you say, you will be rewarded for re-sharing with your own not-very-original comment; you will probably not be rewarded for adding something new.

You are right that the post was partly prompted by rubbish doing the rounds without any fact-checking from the people who share it. I was talking about originality but I think my broader point was about adding something, contributing, creating value. Sharing something original and taking the time to fact-check are both "work", both adding value in the sense that you're doing more than being part of the echo-chamber. That was where I was coming from.

The problem is that there's little reward/attention for sharing something new, so it's tempting just to re-share what everybody else is sharing and maybe add a stonkingly unoriginal comment too. As you say, volubility is rewarded (right up to the point where you get put in "Twitter jail"). What I'm trying to do is think about it from a different angle and maybe examine some assumptions I've been holding unexamined for a long time.

Some thoughts on this so far...

As I just said (slightly shorter) on twitter: I think this is a really good idea, & I was determined to try to do it, but I've found that all it's done is make me feel guilty about retweeting anything -- even the really interesting or useful things. (Of course, nobody is going to suffer from missing those interesting/useful things; none of those 'must-read' articles are really essential.) The main problem is that I haven't had the time or energy to go out and find new sources of information, only to carry on with my usual skimming of twitter, so I've just been feeling like twitter's a bit more read-only -- it's the same feeling I get when I'm watching twitter/facebook/irc but I know I'm supposed to be working so the chat is all happening but I feel like I can't join in, or (confession time) when I'm avoiding engaging with someone on twitter who's having a big whinge about something & I think "if I tweet about something trivial they'll know I'm around & should be reading & sympathising, but if I just don't say anything then I can always claim I just wasn't on twitter so I missed it". Yes, I am that awful a person. :-( 

It is odd and uncomfortable (which doesn't mean it's not a useful exercise) observing one's own social network and feeling like one can't join in with the usual behaviour (e.g. the 'tribal retweeting'). I think it's been a useful antidote to FOMO (it doesn't matter if I don't RT this stuff because someone else will & if they don't it still doesn't matter), and a reminder of just how much I do retweet (too much), but it's also reminded me how if I didn't RT anything I'd disappear a bit more from the minds of all the people I follow on twitter, because so much of what I see in my timeline is RTs from friends and even if they're not adding anything original I often think "oh that's interesting that they read/liked that". I think of the 'tribal RTing' a bit like going to a gig or watching a film with friends (the film/music may be bobbins but the interesting thing is that you're sharing it & can discuss it later, even if that's tearing it apart), and a bit like wearing a badge or a t-shirt to declare your allegiances to all sorts of stuff, and a bit like just laughing at the things your friends say in the pub even if they're weak jokes, just because it's your friends who are making the jokes & you want to join in with the fun. And a bit like looking at someone's book/CD/DVD collection to find out a bit more about who they are. Maybe all those behaviours are awful too. I don't think they're actually harmful so long as you're aware you're doing them, aware of the statements you're making, aware of who you might be excluding by doing so (and I'm happy to exclude some of those people from my social life, which again is maybe an awful way to behave, but "I'm not the Pope").

Oh, and I absolutely agree that they're not a substitute for conversation. I think they're a stopgap when we all have such busy lives that we don't get round to having the proper conversations; I think I'd rather retain that attenuated connection with people I like than lose sight of them altogether. I do think they skew my social interactions towards the people who share stuff on twitter rather than the people I'd actually like to spend more time with; but I think twitter's a symptom as well as a cause there. There are some people I'm really sad about losing touch with but they don't do Facebook or Twitter or email and I don't do phone calls or paper letters and maybe that just means we're kind of incompatible as friends. Which is sad, but we kind of acknowledge that it's OK to end a romantic relationship with someone when your way of living is incompatible with theirs, and I think it's just as OK (and just as sad) to end a friendship, or let it fade, for the same reason. And sometimes those incompatibilities are trivial but they still get in the way enough to make the relationship unsustainable. 

Anyway. I do want to make a bigger effort to link to articles on twitter with my own words rather than just retweeting others, because if the social sharing is the point, then I want to at least share my thoughts/reactions with my friends instead of always sharing second-hand thoughts/reactions (and I think if I actually want people to read stuff then they may be more likely to follow a link that I share with an intriguing pull-quote or a personal response, rather than just thinking "oh she's RTing some more stuff from [whoever]" -- though hard to know if that's true without getting into twitter analytics etc, which... just no). But there's a big tension there between adding attributions and adding your own thoughts (@-mentioning the person who wrote the article and the person who brought it to your attention leaves very little space for any kind of personalisation), and more and more I just feel guilty and fearful of sharing anything that doesn't have full provenance attached to it, a) because I'll get jumped on for copyright/stealing/misrepresenting/decontextualising/inaccessible-pictures-of-text/etc and b) because the chances are it'll be 'debunked' by the time I hit 'send' anyway. This saddens me, because some of the funny pictures etc are funny. They bring a smile into my day and I want to share that with my friends, but of course I don't want to be a worse-than-Hitler tweeter of unattributed photos. (This is part of a bigger problem where I feel that literally everything I could enjoy sharing with other people is 'problematic' for at least a subset of those people & therefore a) off-limits on a social platform with such a broad userbase and b) irrecoverably tainted with guilt anyway.) And trying to contact the people who tweet them to ask where the image originates doesn't tend to be very successful (I got flamed half way to next Tuesday for trying to suggest to someone that they should credit Allie Brosh when stealing her "clean all the things!" pic, because apparently that's Just An Internet Meme & asking people to attribute it is like asking someone to list every single one of the people who worked on the Star Wars movies when saying "May the fourth be with you", or something, and then every tweets would have to be 6 million characters long and the internet would fold in on itself like a soggy souffle and we'd all die. Also getting your artwork turned into a meme is totally the sincerest form of flattery and only HITLER could possibly object.)

*deep breath*

Anyway. Sorry. I've wandered off down a total rabbit-hole here. The other thing I was going to say was: in general I am not very good at abstinence, I would rather fix problems by adding more things than by taking things away (and 'that is my tragedy'); I think what I want, rather than trying to stop retweeting or re-sharing on twitter, is something additional. A place where the focus is less on the quick retweet and more on a considered response, a personal reaction, something longer-form, maybe even (shock horror gasp) something face-to-face. LiveJournal used to be closer to this for me but I've got out of the habit of posting (for a variety of reasons including time and technology but also the fact that a lot of the people I want to talk to aren't really on there any more). I've thought for a while that what I'd like (either as a web thing or a face-to-face thing, but not a twitter/facebook thing) is actually some kind of discussion group, taking a text or a theme and talking about it in a focused kind of way, not dipping in and out of other things all the way through, trying not to just lapse into meme-sharing and catchphrase-quoting. I have no idea how to set up something like this though, partly because I'd want it to consist of people I trust rather than just random weirdos who think it sounds like a good idea. And it would need to have a strict NO SPLAINERS policy, and I don't know how to ensure/enforce that. :-/ 

Anyway... sorry for rambling/ranting at such length. I probably should put this on my LJ. Might cross-post it over there. Or maybe I'll just skim twitter and retweet a picture of a kitten riding on the back of a swan.