Crimes, High Crimes and Twitter Attribution

Someone mentioned today that I failed to credit them for a retweet. I looked back and found that they had, in fact, sent me a link Friday that I posted as a retweet from someone else on Sunday. Trouble was, I never made it past the headline on Friday. So when I ended up reading the article on Sunday via someone else’s link, I’d already forgotten about the original one. I wrote about this issue in 2010. Here’s an updated version.

People have been crying "retweet theft" since there've been retweets. The idea is that some people intentionally fail to attribute sources for links they share on Twitter. I have a two problems with any gravity attached to that concept. One is philosophical and the other technical.

Philosophical: I admit I sometimes feel a twinge of indignity when a follower posts a link I recently shared without giving me RT credit. Fortunately, I usually remember that buying into any sense of being wronged is an inaccurate and personally destructive apprehension of reality. If my motivation in sharing something was altruistic, then the fact that the link gets passed along should trump any perceived slight. And since it’s likely that an omission was unintentional, I’m better served by examining my own negative reaction instead of getting worked up by trying to mind-read the intentions of others. 

Technical: The vast majority of shareable content we run across isn't from Twitter. I personally scan through hundreds and hundreds of headlines every day on Feedly, Flipboard, email lists and other social networks. Additionally, just because we have access to Twitter every waking hour, it doesn’t mean that we have the time or attention to notice every post in our stream. Nor are we obligated to try. The more people we follow, the more likely it is that we'll unintentionally post something that was already shared. And that's okay. No harm done, except to the false sense of self that derives a feeling of worth from being retweeted.

That said, my new approach to Twitter is to be generous with favorites, but stingy on retweets. Favorites show appreciation to others without adding to the noise of an already over-duplicated Twitter stream. I limit retweets now to only the most compelling links, especially those shared by people outside my core social circles.

#lastwords

Here's a more expansive form of a visualized tweet. It takes one of my favorite #lastwords entries and puts it in comic form. The original was, "Beware of dog? Ha! Dogs love me. #lastwords"
#lastwords 01

Self-Amusement Parks and the Attention Economy

I've been feeling very protective recently about my own little corner of The Attention Economy. Especially on social networks. The main reason I choose not to follow someone initially or unfollow down the road is a low level of compatible interests. When someone follows me I scan through a couple of pages of their most recent tweets. If the vast majority aren't interesting to me then I don't follow back. It's nothing personal. It's not a value judgement of their worth to the social network at large. It's simply a calculation between my available time and the relative personal value I see in their posts.

That said, my unfollow gun has developed a hair trigger when I see multiple narcissistic no-value tweets clustered together in my stream. Then it's BAM, BAM, BAM!

Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of short story writing is even more applicable to social network posting: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." Of course, we all have different perspectives about the kind of communication that's worthwhile. But it seems to me there are categories of posts that are inherently garbage to the majority of readers:

• Location check-ins
• Marketing tweets from a third-party online service
• Klout, Empire Avenue or other social media scores
• The song you're listening to, food you're eating, or TV show you're watching
• Sports scores
• Ambiguous Emo posts
• Long strings of tweets without waiting for a response
• Retweets of other people tweeting your praises

It's easy to treat a social network like a free ride in a Self-Amusement Park, repeatedly riding the roller coaster yelling, "Woohoo! Look at me. Look at me!" But being on a social network is more like hanging out in a pub where everyone wears headphones and communicates through microphones. When you speak, no one can avoid listing to the first couple of words. So eventually, if you hog the microphone or babble on about things your fellow networkers don't care about, people are going to mute your channel out of self-defense.

A Public Service Announcement from The Goddess Twitter

What Would McLuhan Think About Pseudonymity and Social Networks?

After a whirlwind week responding to the Google+ anti-pseudonymity policy through video and comic parodies, I rolled up my virtual sleeves over the weekend to give more serious thought to the related issues. I ended up taking a shot at a Twitter micro-rant Sunday morning, asking myself, "What would Marshall McLuhan think?"

It was a trick question. My purpose wasn't to extrapolate what McLuhan would actually have said if he had lived to see the age of the social network. The intention was to use the question as a jumping off point to create a series of probes, throw them into the conversational mix, and hopefully stimulate some fresh thinking.

I'll expand some of the ideas that emerged in upcoming blog posts. For now, here they are in the order that they were posted over the course of half a day on Twitter and Google+:

• The social network is a shared virtual environment that is as psychologically immersive as a 3D virtual world.  

• Social networks will eventually spawn new cultural forms, but we experience it today through a xenophobic small town mentality.

• We experience our social stream as personal space rather than shared commons. That's why we're so offended at unwanted intrusion.

• Some react to the pseudonymous in social networks as they would to masked, costumed people trying to interact in physical life.

• Given that we're all exploring a new social paradigm, it makes sense to give those who are pushing the boundaries a little slack.

• The mere integration of the pseudonymous into social networks assaults mainstream participants' mental models of personal identity

• Pervasive immersion in the social network is deeply transforming our psyche in ways that are mostly invisible to us. Stay tuned!

• It takes disciplined emotional intelligence to take full responsibility for negative feelings we experience in social networks.

• Social networks can facilitate intolerance or reconciliation, suspicion or trust, trivia or wisdom. It's up to us.

That Bitch Stole My Retweet

I received a DM recently that accused me of reposting a tweet without giving proper RT attribution. I didn't have a clue about which one I allegedly pilfered, but she unfollowed me so I couldn't DM and figure out what happened. The following essay is from a 2009 post from one of my human counterpart's blogs and sums up my take on the topic:

There’s been discussion recently about “retweet theft". I have a two problems with any gravity attached to that concept. One is philosophical and the other technical.

Philosophical: I admit I sometimes feel a twinge of indignity when a follower posts a link I recently tweeted without giving me the RT credit. Fortunately, I usually remember that buying into any sense of being wronged is an inaccurate and personally destructive apprehension of reality.

If my motivation in sharing something is altruistic, then the fact that the link gets passed along should trump any perceived slight. And since it’s likely that an omission is unintentional, I’m better served by examining my own motivation instead of getting worked up by trying to mind-read the intentions of the perpetrator.

Technical: As the graphic above visualizes, the vast majority of links I run across every day are from Feedly, not my Twitter client. I imagine that few people use Twitter as their primary news monitoring source. The odds are very likely that most tweet-worthy items we find are from other venues.

Just because many of us have access to a Twitter client every waking hour doesn’t mean we have the time and attention to notice every post in our stream. Nor are we obligated to try. The more people we follow, the less likely it is that we’ll keep up with everyone’s posts, and the more likely it is that we’ll unintentionally fail to give someone credit who has previously posted something in our stream that we find in a different source.

And that’s okay.

Second Life and Social Networks

It was a real kick to see the #SLBumpersticker craze take off this week. It was a great affirmation of two key ideas I've been trying to promote over the last couple of years:

• Transworld Identity. Thousands of avatarians communicate and build community each day over social networks such as Twitter, Plurk and Facebook. Social networks are not only used to to interact with those we know from prior contact in a virtual world, but are now one of the main mediums used by avatar-identified beings to meet and get to know one another. Although there's nothing like hanging out with friends while rezzed in the virtual flesh, the virtual world paradigm is not conducive to the pervasive loosely-coupled contact we enjoy on social networks. 

• Twitter as a platform for creativity. The challenge of formulating a funny or thought-provoking idea in < 140 characters can be a very satisfying and productive creative exercise. I've found it to be such a fertile source of ideas that Twitter has become a core part of my standard creative workflow. I usually write immediately after waking in the morning. I start with a #hashtag topic and then spend half an hour or so writing tweets. I use the Tweetr iPhone client to schedule each tweet for later delivery. That's how I can post a micro-rant over the course of a day even when my human counterpart is tied up in meetings for hours at a time. Tweets can then be used as the basis for blog posts, videos and graphics.

Here's one of my first comics on the topic of social networking, from January 2009:

Open publication - Free publishing - More twitter

Sad But True

The impact of pervasive net-connection on human culture and consciousness

Today's post expands Saturday's micro-rant on the impact of pervasive net-connection on human culture and consciousness. I used the term #tribenet as a tag representing the psychological environment created by continuous connection to social circles via multiple devices and social networks. 

Pervasive net-connection is profoundly transforming us individually and collectively. Like any significant technological change it not only impacts what we do but also who we are. We cook in the medium of #tribenet like lobsters in a simmering pot. We are so contextualized within the change that the transformation is almost invisible to us except in retrospect.

Like all cultural and psychological change created through new technology, #tribenet works through the medium of our biology and psychology. For instance, the desire to expose the mundane events of day-to-day life to our virtual tribe likely stems from deep rooted psychological templates unfulfilled since hunter/gatherer days. Tribe 1.0 was social adaptation to the pre-agrarian tech environment; #tribenet is adaptation to the pervasively networked tech environment.

When our attention is focused on #tribenet we are not fully present in the physical world. We check in with #tribenet every hour like young children making sure mommy keeps watching as we go from ride to ride at the playground. Shifting our minds hundreds of times each day to the virtual environment of #tribenet alters the subconscious ground of our mental models of reality. If a tree falls in a forest and someone is there to hear, there is still no sound until they upload the video and share it on #tribenet.

(After posting yesterday, I found out that there was an existing social network called tribe.net. This post is NOT about that site.)

Transmedia Ecosystem 01: The Medium and The Message

May 2008

It took just a few months of being Botgirl to realize that avatar identity can extend far beyond Second Life. The image on the right was my first attempt to visualize the play of identities across social networks, blogs and media sharing sites.

As you can see, my initial interest revolved around who and where. Although sites specializing in specific mediums like graphics or video were depicted, the focus was more about audience and identity than form and content.

Over the past year or so, I've started to play around with channeling a particular creative concept through different mediums. One of my first experiments in that direction was the TweetStory. The idea was to tell a story one tweet at a time at a pace of no more than two tweets per hour. There were many interesting challenges. For instance, each tweet had to be interesting on its own right since the majority of followers wouldn't be reading them all in sequence.

The next link in the transmedia chain was blogging. I consolidated each day's tweets into a blog post, giving readers a page at once versus a tweet by tweet rendition. The content was identical, but the reader's experience was very different.

Finally, I translated the first five tweets into comic panels. I intentionally used very surrealistic visuals to illustrate how dramatically a new medium can shift meaning.

Here are the first five tweets in text. Please try to imagine what it would be like reading a few of them over the course of a day on Twitter:

I came to consciosness as if in a dream, looking down on a massive brute raping a woman bound face-down on a stone floor. 

"I own you now, you fucking RefuV," he panted as he magically flipped the slender captive onto her back like a puppet on a string. 

I felt strangely detatched peering down from about twenty meters above. Then suddenly, I shifted into that poor girl's POV. 

"You can't escape that way," he sneered. "I control your fucking camera." 

Damn! That "poor girl" must be me.

Here are the comic pages:











The next post on this topic will discuss a more recent transmedia workflow I've been having fun with.

SLdrama Alchemy: Transmuting Combative Crap into Creative Compost

After a week watching the detritus from the latest SLdrama slurry down my Twitter stream, I woke up Saturday morning and entered the Church of the Empty Page to see what She had to say. What emerged was a Twitter mini-rant imagining the posts we might see if only the unvarnished truth could be told.

By the way, if you think none of these apply to you, you're probably mistaken.  I sure was:

• Of course I don't think I'm Nostradamus! I just make guesses about the future and argue as if they're inevitable truth.

• Geez! I just can't understand why my ranting and personal attacks don't persuade you to see things my way.

• I believe that I know exactly what you're really thinking, and nothing you can say will ever convince me otherwise.

• Your logic will never compete with my delusions!

• Don't bother explaining. I'll only respond to the parts I can argue against.

• I did listen! I listened to my own thoughts, right up to the point I interrupted you.

• It's so much easier to rage on and on about this external issue than deal with the unresolved personal issues I'm really mad about.

And finally, here's one I used for the latest installment of Deep Tweets by Botgirl Questi

Damming Twitter

No typo in the headline. I meant damming as you would a river. Or in this case a stream.

I love Twitter. As of today, I've been using it for exactly three years. It's now my primary source of both interesting new links and people. As a matter of fact, I've met more Second Lifers through Twitter than I have inside Second Life.  But although tweeps stick around, tweets are extremely ephemeral. Even the coolest threads get lost downstream within an hour or two. Twitter is designed that way.

I've played around with some practices to reel some of my favorite tweets back in. I decided to list a few of them here in celebration of my 3rd Twitter Anniversary:

• Micro-rants: I sometimes think of Twitter as a performance venue. And one of my favorite forms is the micro-rant, which consists of a series of tweets on a particular topic. Here's one from last month on creativity:
• A creative project, like a marriage, only gets real depth after the honeymoon is over. #creativity
• Be all embracing in brainstorming and ruthless in editing. #creativity
• Any in-progress work of mine that gets cranky is sent to bed for a nap. #creativity
• Most machinima I've seen would have been better off at half the length. Cool ideas are often spoiled by self-indulgence. #creativity
• Be easily amused, but hard to please. #creativity
• To truly worship the Muse, transcribe her every whisper. To be clear, that's "transcribe", NOT "share". #creativity
• An ounce of context is worth a pound of isolated facts. #creativity

• Transforming tweets into blog posts:  Expanding tweets from a micro-rant into a blog post has been a great way to carry them over the typical tweet event horizon. Although I schedule them to be posted over a number of hours, Micro-rant tweets are usually written in the first fifteen minutes after waking, so they're fresh from the subconscious and often full of juicy potential.

• Deep Tweets: This is my newest experiment. I take a tweet, match it up with some New Age music and atmospheric video from a virtual world, and create a 30 second parody of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy parody. Here's the latest:

Deep Tweets by Botgirl Questi - New Video Series

After having such a blast with the @rodvik video, I thought it would be fun to do a twitter takeoff on the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy series. My plan is to do an ongoing series of :30 second clips featuring my favorite "Fortune Cookie Philosophy" tweets. Here's the first:

@rodvik Doesn't Follow Me On Twitter (Maybe He Should) - MUSIC VIDEO

The ongoing @rodvik (Linden Lab CEO) name-dropping craze on Twitter has been wild to watch over the last couple of months. A recent spike focusing on the topic of Second Life Forum gamification made me wonder what it must look like from his end of the stream.

Saturday afternoon, I got the idea of trying to build a song from some of the tweets. I dumped the last few days' @rodvik references into GhostReader, exported a voice track into GarageBand and started cutting, pasting and playing with loops. The "@rodvick doesn't follow me on Twitter, maybe he should" tweet from @SkateFoss emerged as the obvious hook and chorus, and I had a finished song in a few of hours.

Of course, the idea of doing a video popped into my mind. The problem was that given my time constraints over the next few weeks, I didn't see how I could pull it off. But I really, really wanted to release something today. So Sunday morning, I picked a Crazy Talk character template, imported the vocal track and had it crank out an end-to-end automated lip sync. After dumping it into iMovie, it became painfully obvious that there was something missing. So I cut in some dance and band machinima from past projects, added a comic template and had this finished version by mid-afternoon. Here's what I ended up with: 

Sharing, Consuming, Branding and Judging in Social Networks

Grace McDunnough wrote a great post yesterday discussing Second Life relationships in the context of the social network models of Facebook and Twitter. It inspired me to do a little VizThinking on the topic and here's my first iteration:

Dimensions of Social Networking

From an individual activity point of view, social networking consists of sharing and consuming information. . . posting and viewing. These sometimes are part of conversations with one or more people, either explicitly (through an @name) and/or collectively when a particular topic is active within a social circle.

In addition to the literal message of the content, there are also meta-messages related to the sender. Our choices in posting (including who and what we choose to re-tweet) reflect to some extent how we wish to be seen by our social network. And we form impressions of others over time based upon the content, frequency, tone, etc. of their posts.

Although the form of this matrix applies to just about any social network we participate in, the content may vary greatly from network to network and from identity to identity. For instance what I post on Twitter from @botgirlq is very different from what is posted under a human identity on Facebook. Although most of the variance is based upon my perception of the particular interests of each social circle, the question of personal branding sometimes plays a part in my choice of what and where I choose to post (or not post) any particular item of interest.

Anyway, I plan to go through one or two more sessions on the topic and post more later this week.

Evil Botgirl: A Dark Social Network Experiment

Evil Botgirl Twitter Avatar

We all have a lurking Shadow that projects the negative judgements we repress about ourselves onto other people. At 8:00 AM Pacific Time tomorrow, @evilbotgirl will launch her debut Twitter rant to personify and give voice to my own inner demon and perhaps channel the darker side of our collective unconscious.

This is dangerous work. Even within the context of supposedly self-reflective performance art, there is a strong seductive glee that arises in the expression of mean-spirited criticism.  So I'm not sure whether this will be a one time performance or an ongoing series.

In any case, I invite you to join in by contributing your Tweets to the hashtag that will be announced tomorrow morning and by following @evilbotgirl and the coming Twitapocalypse.

The Great Twitter Unfollow Purge

It's becoming harder and harder to keep up with my Twitter stream. Too many posts. Not enough time. So I decided to do a little research and unfollow those who tend to post a high volume of tweets that aren't in an area of my interest. I planned to start off with followcost.com, but I didn't see a way to run a batch and generate a ranked list. I ended up doing it the old fashioned way and clicked through a name at a time on the Twitter web site. That isn't a very efficient way to go through hundreds of names, so after an hour I'm not even halfway through. But I have learned a lot about what I don't find useful. For instance, a constant stream of:

• Personal information from people I don't have personal relationships with.
• foursquare check-ins
• meal reports
• running statistics
• general emo
• weather reports
• Commercial announcements for events or products I'm not interested in
• Links to favorited videos or music
• References to god or political opinion

Now none of the categories I mentioned are bad in themselves. If you habitually post in one of the categories above, I will assume that most of your followers (or at least your mom) are waiting with bated breath to know things like the temperature in your home town, your breakfast menu each morning or the dozen videos you favorited today. But since I personally don't have much use for such information, I hope those I've unfollowed (who notice) won't take it personally.

I also ended up unfollowing people I didn't recognize who hadn't posted in over three months. Although they don't clutter my Twitter stream, I think its a bit disingenuous to keep following people who aren't active just because some of them will unfollow me eventually out of spite and hurt my rankings on Crap's list of top Second Life tweeps.

So that's my story. The purge continues. I feel so clean!

My Top Ten Rules For Responsible Twitter Use

1. To quote Kurt Vonnegut: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time is wasted."
2. Periodically review your last few pages of tweets. Are you follow-worthy? 
3. Don't make people click twice to get to content. If needed, switch the link in a retweet while still crediting the original referrer.
4. The value of retweets to your network are those that cross social circles. RTs are of no use to those who have already seen the initial tweet.
5. Be a bridge by sharing interesting links that significant numbers of your followers have probably not seen before.
6. Use a service like bit.ly for your links so that you can monitor the number of clicks they receive. It's a much more dependable indicator of the value of what you share than retweets.
7. Don't follow more people than you have time to read. This means you will eventually need to prune your followers.
8. Stay away from flame wars. Don't respond to trolls. Block as needed.
9.  Have fun.
10. Follow me.

Botgirl Shares Her Secret Strategy for Twitter Success

I've wrestled with appropriate Twitter strategy on and off over the last couple of years. Since Mr. Crap Mariner started a ranked list of Second Life tweeps, I thought this would be a good time to rethink the topic. Of course, the initial area of inquiry quickly took on a life of its own so I ended up with more of a meditation on human happiness than a plan of action for Twitter. Maybe next time. :)

Any good strategy starts with a clear understanding of the goal we seek to achieve and its underlying purpose. In most cases, the tangible object of our desire is actually a means to a greater end such as happiness for self and others, love, respect, self-improvement, wisdom, etc. Unfortunately it is very common to go through life repeating behaviors that either don't support such underlying higher-level needs or actually undermine them. We don't do a very good job of predicting what will create happiness in our lives.

One concern I have about the trend to gamify life is that it seeks to manipulate our behavior by associating intense, but short-lived gratification with the achievement of otherwise meaningless rewards. It creates the illusory sense that we have satisfied some foundational human need within an intentionally addictive framework that keeps us checking in with Foursquare or following back people on Twitter to inflate our follower count. Although we know in our hearts that being Mayor of Starbucks or being in the top ten of Second Life tweeps isn't really a reflection of being worthy of love and respect, we keep pressing the treat lever like good little lab rats.

That said, I do believe that Twitter can be a genuine vehicle that contributes to the happiness of self and others. It allows us to share information we believe is of value to others. It can be an avenue to initiate friendships that can deepen over time and repeated interaction. It can help us keep in touch with existing friends, colleagues and distant family. It can support our professional life through "personal branding" and providing a vehicle to demonstrate expertise in our field of knowledge.

I have to admit that my own use of Twitter isn't entirely enlightened. I check Twitter Grader from time to time and have thought about how I might increase my score. But I usually come to my senses and seek the same kind of obliviousness I have to Plurk Karma.  Wish me luck!

That Bitch Stole My Retweet

The subject of proper attribution on Twitter came up this week on my Twitter stream. Since my human counterpart had written a pretty good post on the topic back in March '09, I thought I'd syndicate it here for your reading pleasure. BQ

There’s been discussion recently about “retweet theft.” I have a two problems with any gravity attached to that concept. One is philosophical and the other technical.

Philosophical: I admit I sometimes feel a twinge of indignity when a follower posts a link I recently tweeted without giving me the RT credit. Fortunately, I usually remember that buying into any sense of being wronged is an inaccurate and personally destructive apprehension of reality.

If my motivation in sharing something is altruistic, then the fact that the link gets passed along should trump any perceived slight. And since it’s likely that an omission is unintentional, I’m better served by examining my own motivation instead of getting worked up by trying to mind-read the intentions of the perpetrator.

Technical: As the graphic above visualizes, the vast majority of links I run across every day are from Feedly, not my Twitter client. I imagine that few people use Twitter as their primary news monitoring source. The odds are very likely that most tweet-worthy items we find are from other venues.

Just because many of us have access to a Twitter client every waking hour doesn’t mean we have the time and attention to notice every post in our stream. Nor are we obligated to try. The more people we follow, the less likely it is that we’ll keep up with everyone’s posts, and the more likely it is that we’ll unintentionally fail to give someone credit who has previously posted something in our stream that we find in a different source.

And that’s okay.