Cryptwitter

[crypto]

After posting last night about maybe getting a fannish Twitter account, I found three new articles about Twitter posted at the media studies site FlowTV. So I'm cryptoxin on Twitter: now what?

The best of the FlowTV pieces -- and the one which speaks most immediately to my interests -- is People I Want to Know: Twitter, Celebrity and Social Connection by Liz Ellcessor, and Leigh Edwards' Twitter: Democratizing the Media Corporate Branding is also relevant (though I think there's supposed to be an 'or' in the title before 'Corporate Branding' and a question mark at the end). Still, it feels like they're only scraping the surface -- understandably, for short pieces on an emerging phenomenon.

Louisa Stein's It's Contagious: Twitter and the Palimpsest of Authorship juxtaposes Twitter with lim 's vid Us, but I honestly couldn't figure out what her argument was -- something about "the prismatic processes of individual and collective authoring." Which sounds good, but the piece itself didn't make a lot of sense to me, and reads more like shorthand notes from a talk or an overgrown abstract for a longer and more thoroughly argued essay. Or am I just being dense?

Off to 'follow' Lauren Conrad and Lil C....

Comments

[sara]

Lim! And Twitter! Both on the internets! Both cool! Both use a lot of jump cuts, either literal or metaphoric!

(Sorry, did you think there was more to the argument than that? I could throw in some nice polysyllabic words, but I don't think that would make it more convincing.)

I am reminded, in the couple of weeks since I started using Facebook, that I am really not capable of short-form online communication. I need my complete sentences!

[crypto]

Ha. I was erring on the side of 'benefit of the doubt' but that basically describes my initial gut reaction.

I haven't managed to sign in to Facebook in months. I just got a guilt-inducing email from them pointing out that I have all these friend requests that I haven't responded to yet. I think I have to sign in this weekend, because my supervisor just sent me a friend request and that's the kind of offer you can't refuse.

[sara]

I set it up so I don't get e-mailed notifications on that stuff, actually -- but all my cousins are using it, and I've gotten back in touch with friends from college and grad school, which is nice. I don't think it'll ever be the thing I get up in the mornings and look at first, if you know what I mean.

[crypto]

I like the idea of being back in touch with people, though I haven't actually posted anything to FB. And a lot of my friends now use it instead of email to organize social stuff, so it's hard to opt out of.

[cofax7]

Oh, thank god I'm not the only one who avoids FB like the plague. And the longer I avoid, the more guilty I feel. But I don't LIKE the place!

[crypto]

Nope, not the only one!

I don't know, I feel like if I used it more, I'd probably like it more, but it so far it feels like a trip to the dentist or the mall. Or maybe a mandatory office party with no alcohol in a dreary windowless conference room with flourescent lighting.

[lo_rez]

::points to cofax comment::

What she said. I don't want to be findable by random people I happened to have known at one time, tyvm.

Deeply creepy in some ways, FB, and socially coercive with it.

I suppose some might have a similar reaction to LJ's pseudonymity.

[crypto]

Deeply creepy in some ways, FB, and socially coercive with it.

This may be a stretch, but FB does feel a bit like the online social networking version of national ID cards and surveillance databases.

[lo_rez]

Yeah, only it's right up front about the profit thing. (Instead of being, um, crypto-profitable, as it were, like those databases...)

In case you haven't seen it, here's danah boyd's post about FB's attempt to dictate how people are (or, actually, aren't) supposed to use the platform. "Authentic usage only," dontcha know.

Ick. What makes these people think they're the boss of me? It's genuinely baffling.

[anatsuno]

*follows you around like an internet puppy?*

Yeah, twitter, I dunno. I just followed Michael Rosenbaum, which I'm sure will end up obnoxiously hipster actor ironic frat boy cool or somesuch. I probably will unfollow in a couple of weeks...

I like reading my friends updates, though.? And Misha Collins has been very entertaining so far.

Welcometo the short new wrld! :)

[crypto]

*waves* (I've been thinking of you recently and, as always, fondly)

I've seen Misha Collins' tweets. They scare me a bit -- I get weirded out by the constant direct address to fans. I think that's why I can't deal with the idea of following actors as real people, but I'm okay with following people whose TV careers are about being real people on reality shows. The latter come to Twitter already garbed in their established self-fashionings, but the people I'm used to seeing dressed up as fictional characters seem all too embarrassingly naked on Twitter.