I’m going to have to block in some time to summarise and comment on some of the interesting reflections that have emerged as a result of our MSc Twitter experiment.
There have been a few comments about 140 characters being insufficient. I wonder if this isn’t missing the point of Twitter though? Maybe Twitter’s strength is the way it enables what I’m going to call “ambient collegiality”.
This idea is partially based on Leisa Reichelt’s notion of ambient intimacy:
Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight. (Reichelt 2007)
More recently, Guy Merchant has contested the view that Twitter’s function is only phatic and coined the phrase ‘ambient sociablity’:
Ambience seems to catch the sense of lightweight contact that typifies microblogging, and sociability leaves it open to both the level of friendship and the sort of exchanges that are transacted. (Merchant 2009)
In the context of a course like this, or of my use of Twitter for professional networking, I like the idea of ambient collegiality: being able to know what my peers are reading, writing about, reflecting on in nearly-now, almost real-time. They can share conference calls for papers, invitations for project funding, jobs, new software, relevant news. It’s a distributed senior common room without coffee.
References
Merchant, G. (2009). Ambient sociability. My Vedana. Retrieved May 20, 2009, from http://myvedana.blogspot.com/2009/05/ambient-sociability.html
Reichelt, L. (2007). Ambient Intimacy. Disambiguity. Retrieved October 8 2009, from http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
“Ambient collegiality” – perfect. Quick, trademark it and/or put it on wikipedia!
@Sian
You heard it here first right? I may need to call on you as a witness in court at some later date …
[...] This week began with a bang: a longish post on one of the set readings, another go at the multimodal (another video) and a quick swipe at Prezi (ed techies’ new preferred presentation software). I posted quite a lot that week (a lull at work perhaps or real enthusiams for readings and tasks?) and managed to select the visual artefact I wanted to share. I also thought of the phrase that best sums up why I love Twitter: “ambient collegiality”. [...]