"Twitter is outdirectedness cubed."

My wife is a borderline obsessive reader of the New York Times.  When she gets behind certain sections of it pile up around the house.  But in the end all of it gets read.  Some of it she clips and puts on my desk where it also piles up but in the end all of it, too, gets read.

Hence my late discovery of this interesting essay from July with the title, "I Tweet, Therefore I Am."  The essay refrences a forthcoming book by Sherry Turkle at MIT.  In it Turkle talks about how  posts to Facebook or Twitter gradually take on the character of a performance, an identify constructed for consumption by other people.  Not really your true self.  She reminds us of how the sociological masterwork The Lonely Crowd described the transformation of Amercian culture from inner-directed to outer-directed and how social media has sped that up.   Hence the title of this post, a quote from Turkle.

As any pioneer on the bleeding edge of the NewMR will tell you, we have embraced the basic tenant of behavioral economics that says people don't always do what they say they will do or can even explain after the fact why they did what they did.  This makes working with survey data a bit challenging, to say the least.  But by the same token, if people we listen to in social media are not true selfs but selfs constructed for our consumption, it raises some pretty significant challenges for working with social media information.

Or, to put it in terms a survey geek can understand we might say: Twitter is social desireaiblity on steroids.

Comments

[Reg Baker]

@Andrew -- I'm no Luddite, but I have a strong attachment to fountain pens.

@Annie -- I agree! What I find irksome is when the competitive juices get flowing and sometimes reasonable and well-informed researchers try to convince clients that social media is all you need to understand your market.

[Ray Poynter]

Whilst not everybody is going to rush over to a post-modern, post-structualist position, surely there are a few things that most of us will agree with.

1) All discourse is social
2) Meaning is not that which was intended, but that which is constructed by the parties involved
3) Social events have more than one meaning, either we accept there are multiple truths or that there are no truths
4) Most people are highly skilled at discourse, which results in much of the meaning that is created not being specifically spelled out in the text

One great example of the way all discourse is social is the group of sounds we make when we are on our own, in public. For example you are walking down the street and you stub your toe and utter "ouch" or you nearly drop something and say "oops" - these utterances are produced with amazing speed, at a time of stress, and are a message to the other people on the street that a minor something is happening, you have noticed it, you have it under control, and there is no need for them to be involved, but a bit of sympathy might not go amiss.

The point for research is that all social personas are constructed, as are all other aspects of our life. Some of the issues in social media may be different from other aspects of life, but I doubt that they are bigger.

[Annie Pettit]

All the more reason to take advantage of multi-mode methods. The bias and skew of one method counter the bias and skew of the other.

If only there was such a thing as the single perfect, unbiased, unskewed, 100% representative, 100% generalizable sample. Wow, if I had that, I'd be a billionaire! :)

[Andrewjeavons]

I admire your pure Luddite tendencies Reg, I really do ;-). But surely there is no true personality ? Perhaps social media just allows different facets to emerge ? Should we all go back to letters with fountain pens (not pencil) ? Carrier pigeons ? Are we all one single face to the world ? I think therefore I Twitter....