On The Presentation of Self (in under 140 characters)

(This post has been lingering in my head since an interesting talk to the HCT Group at Sussex by Sarah Lewthwaite last year.)

So, here's the thing.

Microblogging isn't one thing.

(No, that wasn't quite it. Let's try again.)

It is more context dependent than people seem to realise.

Here, the context of that small stream you deliver impacts on what you say and how you say it.

And this is where some things get confused.

At first glance the status updates on Facebook match the tweets on Twitter. They appear the same.

After all, how much can you really say in 140 characters?

However, it's here that you can really see the difference in context. By brevity those differences are almost highlighted.

Our social circles likely differ between the two applications, as will our tone. In my case, Facebook has a mixed-bag of friends, acquaintances, colleagues and people I went to school with 15 years ago whereas Twitter tends toward industry contacts and people whose thoughts I want to hear.

I wrote differently for each. I presented myself differently. My preferred style and content changed for each.

Not that I had particularly noticed this.

But then I started updating Facebook with my tweets. I found myself editing what I was saying on Twitter with the realisation that my contacts on Facebook wouldn't know the context or content of what I was saying. I found myself not using Twitter since it would seem weird on Facebook.

Brevity doesn't mean conformity.

I'm trying to picture a context where we post the same thing across all these sites, 140 characters mirrored. The problem here is engagement - if our feeds were unified we would not be engaging and participating in the community of each space.

It is more noticeable in the case of microblogging, not simply because of brevity, but because (unlike with weblogs) these updates are intimately tied to the social space in which we place them.

(And that's my non-conclusive rant done. Seems I couldn't do it in 140 characters. Final count: 2004.)

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UPDATE:
It was good to see today that Raj Anand had similar problems, and that it wasn't just me. In my case I'm sticking with the mirroring, just to see what the challenges are. I just wish I had the time to conduct some proper research and formally analyse the difference between the two.

Comments

[Sophie]

My twitter and Facebook status updates mirror but I've only found myself actually thinking about this on a very few occasions.

Because I always update Twitter, rather than Facebook, I find it's only the Facebook reaction I worry about. I wonder if I would get the same rare concerns if I updated the other way around?