Participation rower

Net Smart :egy is to dilute it good talk. You unters i -ely in the cybersphere How to Thrive Online when you put Mto4g jh rints and profiles. Create a Google profile to take control world sees when it searches for you.65 Think about wh e , e ches for you; do what's in -'7 your P0 o do abol rints and orofiles. - don't control ) '1 No discussion of digital participation can afford to ignore twitter, tue S unexpected medium that ballooned to hundreds of millions of users. Twit- S ter literacy is a perfect example of how your knowledge of how to use your Howard Rheingold attention, participate and collaborate, and use networks will determine how or whether you use the medium successfully. 11 drawings by Anthony Weeks Twitter Literacy of es Twitter has turned out to be less an inane lifelog of what we ate for lunch and much ii- more a streaming list of cleverly editorialized headlines with links to the main arti- If- cle. For many of us, Twitter is becoming the front page of our morning newspaper. ts, Either in perception or in practice, our reporters are becoming our friends and our friends are becoming the editors of our Twitter-based newspaper. 11- —David Sasaki, "Our Friends Become Curators of Twitter-Based News," 2010 n- he "The role of the internet was critical at the beginning," [Amr] Gharbeia says. "On 'S the 25th, the movements of the protesting groups were arranged in real time through Twitter. Everyone knew where everyone else was walking and we could L'S advise on the locations of blockades and skirmishes with police. It was real-time St navigation through the city, and that's why it was shut down." —Mike Elkin, "New Video: Cairo Geeks Survive Tahrir Square Assault," 2011 oy lal Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spans. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time 'Its gh or a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it—and how you grasp it. A characteristic or feature of a technol- Is ogy that enables a human to grasp it is known as an "affordance." A door- ne knob is an affordance for a door; a point-and-click command structure is il- an affordance for a graphical user interface. The doorknob allows a human in to comprehend and manipulate the door with a hand. The point-and-click The MIT Press ity command enables a human to manipulate digital objects. Twitter has a Cambridge, Massachusetts osi- blank box where text can be entered, a question ("what's happening?"), London, England en- and a 140-character limit. Those are all affordances that both constrain and bad empower your use of Twitter. Twitter users can follow anyone they want Reciprocity: People give and ask freely for information they need. (except for people who have "protected" their accounts, granting access by A channel to multiple publics: I'm a communicator, and have a following that permission), and anyone can follow them. The following is asymmetrical. I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or video People can block others fiom following them. Everyone's followers are vis- in seconds—and each of the people who follow me might also feed my ible to others. Those are all social affordances. Taken together, those social memes to their own networks. affordances create a platform for social innovations. Asymmetry: The fact that nobody is required to follow those who follow A good example is the . A Twitter user, Chris Messina, thought them adds an interesting social twist to Twitter, because nobody sees the it would be useful to create ad hoc groups of people who share an interest, same sample of the Twitter population that others see. Few people follow a locale, or an event, whether or not they followed each other .66 He pro- exactly the same people who follow them. There is no social obligation posed what has come to be known as the hashtag—putting the # symbol to follow people simply because they follow me. I tell them that I follow in front of a word and then using search to pull out all the tweets that use people who inform or amuse me, and hope to do the same for people who that hashtag. One of the first events to utilize the hashtag was the South follow me. by Southwest Interactive Conference, known as sxsw—so the hashtag was A way to meet new people: Connecting with people who share your interests #sxsw. Third parties built Twitter search engines, and Twitter client compa- has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I nies like TweetDeck (recently purchased by Twitter), HootSuite, and Sees- follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm for edu- mic made it easy to follow all the tweets that are emitted around specific cational technology, do-it-yourself video, online activism, creativity, social . I have TweetDeck columns displaying my Twitter lists and persis- media, and digital —the list is as long as my list of interests. tent searches for hashtags that link me to various communities. Developing the ability to know how much attention and trust to devote When I started requiring digital journalism students to learn how to to someone met online is a vitally important corollary skill. PLNs are not a use Twitter, I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "1 have a numbers game. They are a quality game. classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don't know who to A window on what is happening in multiple worlds: I am familiar with some of follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a these worlds, and others are new to me. In chapter 5, I'll explore the power list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One of connections to people who are unlike our most familiar communities. at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the Forming community: Twitter is not a community but rather an ecology in president to Africa. One of my students asked me online why I use Twitter. which communities can emerge. That's where the banal chitchat comes in: I replied off the top of my head. Sometimes, that's better than taking longer idle talk about news, weather, and sports is a kind of social lubrication that to compose something more elaborately thought Out (which is one of the can enable the networks of trust as well as norms of reciprocity from which reasons I like to Twitter—it's a great way to start my word flow for the day community and social capital can grow. with something short and lightweight). My other reasons are: A platform for mass collaboration: I forgive Twestival's cute name, because this online charity event has raised over a quarter-million dollars via Twit- Openness: Anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else (unless ter, funding fifty-five clean-water projects for seventeen thousand people in they restrict access to friends who request access). Ethiopia, Uganda, and India.67 Institutions are emerging around the use of Immediacy: Twitter is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter Twitter in emergency disaster relief.68 if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and Searchability The ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or hours, every day, to get in the groove. "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information Variety: The diversity on Twitter includes political or technical argument, radar on topics that interest me. I can pull RSS feeds of those searches into gossip, scientific info, news flashes, poetry, social arrangements, classrooms, my dashboard as news radars. repartee, scholarly references, and bantering with friends. And I'm in con- trol of deciding how much of each flavor I want in my flow. I don't have to I still hang out on Twitter (I am found there as @hrheingold), but it's listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for clear that many of the people I talk to about it just don't get why any- whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness. one wastes their time doing anything with the name tweeting. So I tell them that to me, the successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and The use of Twitter to build PLNs, communities of practice, and tuned feeding. And by successful, I mean that I gain value—useful information information radars involves more than one literacy. The business about and answers to questions along with new friends and colleagues—and that tuning and feeding, trust and reciprocity, and social capital is a form of net- the people who follow me gain value in the form of entertainment, useful work literacy that I will detail in chapter S. Knowing that Twitter is a flow, information, and some kind of ongoing weak-tie relationship with me. not a queue like your email in-box, to be sampled judiciously is only one To oversimplify, the successful use of Twitter depends on knowing how part of infotention practice. My students who learn about the presentation to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology litera- people who follow you. ture see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter stage every You have to tune who you follow. I mix friends who I know IRL ("in day—an essential foundation for participatory media literacy. real life"), and whose whereabouts and doings interest me, people who are Attention literacy is reflective. Crap detection is analytic. Participation knowledgeable about a field that interests me, people who regularly pro- is deliberate. Next, I introduce the social literacies: collaboration, collective duce URLs that prove useful, extraordinary educators, and the few who are intelligence, social production, virtual communities, and other newfangled wise or funny. I learned from master educators on Twitter that growing and social forms that digital publics have invented—and what you need to tuning a PLN of authoritative sources and credible colearners is one of the know to be both a mindful participant and a beneficiary of cybersociality. success strategies in a world of digital networks. PLNs are important enough that I will detail best practices for cultivating them in chapter S. Feeding my network comes down to putting out the right mixture of personal tweets (while I don't really talk about what I had for lunch, the cycles of my garden, the plums falling from my tree, and my obsession with compost and shoe painting do feature in my tweet stream), informa- tional tidbits (when I find really great URLs, that's when Twitter is truly a microblog for me to share my finds), self-promotion (when I post a new video to my YouTube channel, I share the URL—but I do not automati- cally post everything I on smartmobs.com), socializing, and answer- ing questions. It's particularly crucial to respond to people who follow me and send @hrheingold messages to my attention. I can't always respond to every single one, but I try. I also try to be a little entertaining once in a co while, when something amuses me and I think it might amuse others. Everyone has a different mix of these elements, which is part of Twitter's charm. My followers have encouraged me to keep some personal element going, but not to overdo it. I am careful not to crank up the self-promotion too much. I don't ask questions often, yet when I do, I always get a huge payoff. I needed an authoritative guide to Spanish-language online publi- cations about social media for a course I was designing to be taught at the (online) Open University of Catalonia. I got five. Within five minutes. If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But again, you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you and your followers (and idle amusement is a perfectly legit use).