Frances Bell’s Blog

I came across a conversation in Twitter that made think about ways of understanding people’s use of Twitter and their management of their personal networks within it. Here is the conversation extracted from my stream of tweets - remember to read the conversation from the bottom.

unfollow conversation

First of all, I would like to make clear that I love Twitter - it not only amplifies my existing personal network but also helps me to expand my network in a low cost way that I would not exploit on blogs or in online communities. Twitter is a low entry cost networking tool -all you need to do is complete a profile, make some connections, and start posting updates.
Those of us who engage in conversations and networking online have a personal network of people with whom we are connected, some of whom are also our face to face contacts and meet daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This network is traversed and conversations are conducted through a variety of channels, primarily through the network services in which we are enrolled (Twitter, Facebook, linked-in - see http://unhub.com/francesbell/ for a sample of the services that I use) but also through email, phone and face to face communication.
Steinmueller developed a model of online community based on his analysis of Usenet ‘communities’. His model allows us to look at community as ’service’ - the provider’s view, or from the user’s view - an individual’s personal network. (I’d like to apologise here for the very naff diagram that I created in 2003 – suggestions for new drawing tool to use would be gratefully accepted).

His model was developed from his study of Usenet and has much in common with others who analyse online communities, namely the 3 Ps - People, Purpose and Policy. People relates to community membership that defines the boundaries of the community (see that alien being ejected from the community). Purpose is more or less prominent in different communities, and can be common, agreed across the community or multiple with members using the community for different purposes. Policies can be explicit - user policies that express expected behaviours - or implicit where other users model what is expected and apply sanctions. What makes Steinmueller’s model different is his inclusion of Sustainability. He defines sustainability as something that can be lost either when there is a coordination failure or, for enough individuals, the costs of participation exceed the perceived benefits. These costs could be a financial cost of belonging to a community or simply that the number of emails in your inbox from the community (say, a list server) vastly exceeds the usefulness of any posts you read.
So how might this 3Ps +S model play out in Twitter where we experience our network within a vast (but largely unseen) space of more than 1 million people? People in our own personal network appear in bi-directional relationships with us - those we follow and those who follow us. Purpose is not usually explicit in Twitter but those whose Twitter networks overlap will have some common purposes e.g. information seeking within shared interests. #tags that aggregate posts around events or topics may be taken as a surrogate of purpose but the limited archive of tweets tends to make them ephemeral . Policies are definitely unwritten and emergent - I shared my ‘follow decision strategy’ with a friend and found she adopted the same approach – follow if interesting friend already known to me else read the profile, follow personal link, read the last few tweets, follow if interesting! Steinmueller’s definition of Sustainability is quite applicable to Twitter. We do make that instant ‘ economic’ decision on whether to follow someone - for Dave cormier a post that stops him from ’scanning’ , and our decision to unfollow may be reactive (too many posts) or systematic, inspired by this list of archetypes http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/?p=611&cpage=6, or from a Twitter unfollow tool http://tinyurl.com/d4qkqg. Coordination failure is an issue on Twitter (possibly reduced if Twitter merges with Google http://tinyurl.com/d3ug7c) not least because of frequency of Fail Whale.
For me, my personal network on Twitter is sustainable and very useful, particularly as I reinforce it with blog links, face to face events and bookmarking of contacts.

References

Bell, F. .2003. Learning Communities - reality or feelgood factor. Education in a Changing Environment. University of Salford http://tinyurl.com/d8stz9
Steinmueller, W.E. 2002. Virtual communities and the new economy. In Inside the communication revolution: Evolving patterns of social and technical interaction, 21-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VOciwO7I50AC&pg=PA21&dq=Steinmueller+Virtual+communities+and+the+new+economy