Twitter for Dummies (i.e. me) - by Thirith
Scots Taffer on 8/9/2015 at 10:28
Quote Posted by Aja
Breaking news will often be reported on twitter before anything else, so it can be useful if want to learn about a current event that hasn't made it into the news cycle yet. Otherwise my twitter feed seems to be an endless stream of egotistical self-styled comedians, philosophers, and political activists, and reading it usually leaves me feeling depressed. I'm not sure there's anything to get; either you enjoy being privy to others' constant musings and sharing your own or you don't.
Inline Image:
http://i.imgur.com/ksCRU9C.png:)
Thirith on 8/9/2015 at 11:36
Aja, my question is this, I guess: if I'm into all those things you describe, how is Twitter better at delivering them than, say, Facebook, which also allows for longer interactions? Or is it exactly that Twitter is like that aspect of Facebook concentrated, without including the other distractions?
Yakoob on 9/9/2015 at 00:14
TBH, I prefer to scroll my FB Feed than twitter feed. At this point it has learned enough of my interests (and I have enough diverse friends) that it provides a nice mix of world news, gaming gossip and personal updates from my friends.
But to play devil's advocate, I am probably primary candidate for the "bubble" effect and FB's little mind-and-mood-altering social experiments.
doctorfrog on 9/9/2015 at 04:42
Quote Posted by faetal
For me it's more that you get what's happening in a more raw fashion, rather than the media-treated version. You get a lot of eye-witness "on the ground" tweets from people actually going through e.g. police brutality without the press doing its usual thing of massaging the language to portray it in the way which fits the editorial agenda.
Ignoring for the moment that we could argue about the filter or agenda that anyone anywhere might have, I can share your enthusiasm for that kind of information. What is your method for getting what is valuable to you as quickly as possible without scrolling through what people had for lunch and "sponsored content you might be interested in?" Serious question. Because if I follow someone who said something interesting, I'm now stuck with literally every other mundane piece of nonsense they ever tweet.
faetal on 9/9/2015 at 10:47
The difference is that the media has a focussed agenda which can only be achieved by the existence of editorial management layers. A bunch of individuals all tweeting about what's happening in their locality can be viewed and the one can get a feel for the middle of the bell curve and decide on that being a decent approximation of what's happening. Sure there are filters - for example, if you only get this kind of info via someone who is re-tweeting it, then that person has the ability to be an editorial filter. This is why hashtags are useful, allowing for the fact that they only gain their use after something starts trending and people use them more uniformly.
[EDIT] As for your latter question, I just follow someone so long as the good outweighs the bad. If I can stand to unfollow them, that usually means the equation has shifted against their favour.
doctorfrog on 10/9/2015 at 07:25
Quote Posted by faetal
The difference is that the media has a
focussed agenda which can only be achieved by the existence of editorial management layers.
I'm actually... mostly ok with this. I really think that you can select media outlets whose agenda are either to be as unbiased as possible or make their bias pretty obvious to you. The alternative is attempting to scrape all news yourself and analyze it for any bias, or just using Twitter as an information source, which is a whole lot of work.
Quote:
[EDIT] As for your latter question, I just follow someone so long as the good outweighs the bad. If I can stand to unfollow them, that usually means the equation has shifted against their favour.
A whole lot of work. I can disagree with an editorial slant, I can glance cockeyed at something that's worded in a way that raises alarm bells that's been put together by a media giant. That takes work, too. There's a price you pay to want to be informed, and that's a constant vigilance and analysis. It just seems that there's so much crap to info ratio on Twitter, that it's asking for more work to do for this.
If you're willing to bore yourself for my benefit, could you give me an example of a useful piece of information, or a perspective, that you've gotten from Twitter, and how you got it? How much stuff you had to go through to get it?
I'm still really curious about how I might make use of this service, or if I'm just missing the point completely. Because it still seems like a popularity/promotional/feelgood tool that one might only accidentally get some genuine information from.
And thanks for trying to explain instead of telling me I'm an old idiot who should just f off, I'm sure that's easier to do.
faetal on 10/9/2015 at 11:00
Pretty much the entire Arab spring unfolded on and was partly mediated by Twitter, since it is impossible for a government to enforce any kind of information control when people are hearing about it all first hand. If you honestly prefer a media which by its definition exists to a) sell copy and b) not upset advertisers to being able to (selectively, via clicking a hashtag) take a broader sample and then see what consensus, then that's your issue, not Twitter's. If you expect others to do the legwork for you, then you are going to get the level and quality of information commensurate with your time investment.
Another great example is how vastly different the situation in Palestine looks from the ground without the media polish on it - from both sides of the fence.
demagogue on 10/9/2015 at 11:43
Twitter is anecdotal though. If you want as independent information as you could hope for, but still salient, I'd recommend academic & int'l org/public agency reports (the more buried & less politicized the better), like the reports for UN bodies or by NGOs. They'll give you all the background info and data points you need to make sense of a whole issue.
What anecdotal narratives are good for IMO is getting a sense for how people there are thinking. You should take their actual reports with a grain of salt, or at least limited to their direct observation (people see what they see), but it really gives you an idea how they see the world & will react to things. And for that, blogs are good.
Twitter... is so-so. It's so boiled down, imo you don't get such a full picture of their way of thinking. Only their gut reactions to certain things. I like the general sentiment over the particular reaction.
faetal on 10/9/2015 at 15:27
You don't tend to get a decent empirical picture until several years later though. I'm not saying Twitter = truth, newsmedia = sheeple, I'm saying Twitter = raw data (a reporter's piece is also anecdotal from the reporter's perspective until it gets interwoven with whatever AP is putting out plus the often very partisan presentation of the "facts" which get sprinkled on top (again, the situation in Palestine is a pretty good case study). All you need to do is watch reports on situation A from several different countries or even just several different stations in the same country to see how much filtering and sometimes baking goes on.
Yakoob on 12/9/2015 at 22:29
Quote Posted by doctorfrog
A whole lot of work ...There's a price you pay to want to be informed, and that's a constant vigilance and analysis.
You're not alone, and that's my struggle with, well, all knowledge in general. We're well beyond information overload stage; it's good, but we haven't figured a good way to process it all yet. Unless you dedicate your school and later life to these studies you don't really have time to really get an unbiased picture. Even so, you're only limited to a handful of topics before your own time runs out :/
That's why data scientists/analysts are become increasingly important imho - we got all the data, so now we need a better way to make sense of it all.
Quote Posted by faetal
I'm saying Twitter = raw data
I think that's a great way to put it actually, it's like getting first-accounts. The sheer number of people + limtied twitter length turns the "deep-but-not-broad" blogosphere into "shallow-but-broad" sampling pool. Arab Spring is another great example of usefulness/power of Twitter too, will keep that in mind. Your insights are super useful, as always, faetal. Thanks :)
So in light of that, how do you guys feel about media manipulation of Twitter and "manufactured" viral events? I don't think it's really happened for anything world/politically significant (as far as we know), but I've heard a few (arguably anecdotal) accounts of from marketing. Hundreds/thousands of procedurally generated bots strategically tweeting certain topic or hashtags until they take off and can maintain organic popularity.
IMO - that stuff happened way before as well, but Twitter is yet another powerful iteration of doing it even more efficiently. I would not be surprised if, in not too distant future, similar strategy was successfully used for critical political agendas. If it hasn't already.
