Tworality, Twethics and Twanarchy

Twitter is great because it’s a genuine community. As m’learned colleague Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR puts it:

Twitter is a truly democratic network in which an individual must earn the respect of another user in order to engage in conversation and become a part of their network. Users that don’t follow these basic principles simply are ignored, aren’t followed or are blocked.

The only aspect of Wadds’ view I’d slightly disagree with is the notion that Twitter is ‘democratic’. It seems to me that it’s a lot closer to being anarchic: a confederacy of individuals. The Twitter ’society’ is governed by a minimalist ’state’ that confines its activities to providing the platform and policing the worst spammers. Twitterers form loose, informal groupings or syndicates within the larger community. Social ties are reinforced by

• engaging in conversations;
• contributing useful, interesting or entertaining tweets;
• retweeting when appropriate and
• helping others to form rewarding relationships.

The more you put into Twitter, the more you get out of it. That’s fantastic. It’s social networking come of age. It’s Web 3.0. It’s the bee’s knees.

But Twitter faces two threats:

1. Subversion for profit. There will always be those who seek to abuse the community for their own ends. There are few ways to do anything about this, short of the Twitter management strengthening its governing role in the system, which might have the unwelcome side-effect of stifling some valuable aspects of the free community.

I spent a lot of time last week tweeting and retweeting attacks on the founder of one particular Twitter scam - Tweetergetter - discussed in my last post. Plenty of other people did the same, while others took the reasonable view that making a fuss only helped the scammers promote themselves. Notable in the third group was The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who suggested that ‘…name and shame doesn’t shame enough, [and] only adds publicity.’ Another journalist, the editor of a major regional paper, made the point that although he found such schemes ‘odious’, our best bet was to let them die quietly.

These guys are very experienced in media matters, and we can’t ignore their opinions. However, I’d suggest that the only way of minimising subversion of Twitter without reducing its usefulness is for users to fight back. In a community without a strong ’state’ it’s up to the ‘citizens’ themselves to maintain the community’s integrity and to be seen to do so. If that integrity is allowed to slide, everything will eventually fall apart.

2. Too much focus on hierarchies. Last week I coined a couple of vaguely risqué Twitterisms: twellatio and twatronage. Both were cheap jokes around the interesting subject of how a Twitterer’s status is assessed in terms of number of followers and/or real world fame. One of the great unspokens of Twitter is that perceived rank really does matter. If it didn’t, ’services’ like Tweetergetter would never get off the ground.

You can see the fight for status in action in the way follower acquisition seems to accelerate. While part of that must be down to the greater exposure increased follower numbers bring, it’s also reasonable to suggest that as you acquire larger numbers of followers your status increases, with the result that more people want to follow you and be noticed by you. The only situation in which this general rule seems not to apply is if you’ve visibly gained a large number of followers by following lots of people who have reciprocated.

Of course, this is all explainable in terms of human natural history. We - men especially - have undergone millennia of natural and sexual selection that have conditioned us to seek high status. But is status competition good for Twitter? If it drives people to contribute more and better content, then yes. If achieving rank and/or reaching as wide an audience as possible become the dominant drives in the community, then no. Anything that causes the structure of Twitter’s anarchic ’society’ to move away from the get-out-what-you-put-in, society of equals ideal can only be corrosive in the long term.

How the community can be persuaded to stick to a set of ideals about how it should work is a different question. What turns Twitterers into Twitizens? A statement of twethics? A twanifesto or Twagna Twarta? A Twonstitution, drafted by Twames Twaddison and Twomas Twefferson? Who knows?

UPDATE

Phil Whitehouse has had a go, with his Twitter Ten Commandments. Not sure I agree with some of these, but it’s a start!