Interactions - September/October 2010

difficult to see why. Having a conversation 140 characters at a time is like trying to swim laps in one of those tiny hotel swimming pools. As soon as you get started, you hit a wall.

South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson infamously screamed “YOU LIE!” at Barack Obama during his healthcare speech to Congress in September 2009. Whatever else you might think about this remark, it seemed to me a sign of the times, representing the new low our public discourse has reached. And yet Wilson’s outburst is exactly the type of “dialogue” one typically encounters on Twitter, particularly when one person is responding to another.

Consider Twitter’s ubiquitous interjection, “FAIL.” These days it seems that every one of life’s letdowns gets the #fail treatment. Here’s an example from @iprash on the Conan O’Brien “Tonight Show” debacle: “Not sure what Leno’s angle is—my feeling is he is being pushed around too. I think this is NBC FAIL pure and simple.” There’s just as little intellectual content in saying that something “is fail” as there is in screaming at the president “YOU LIE!” And how is one supposed to respond to such one-dimensional criticisms? Is this even a conversation worth having?

Perhaps this is simply the
byproduct of what Clay Shirky
recently pointed out on edge.
org, that the “shock of inclusion,
where professional media gives
way to participation by two bil-
lion amateurs, means that aver-
age quality of public thought has
collapsed.” Beyond simply giving
the thoughtless a bullhorn, there
is certainly also a structural
reason behind Twitter’s remedial
discourse. Even when you have
otherwise intelligent people
participating, they often end
up sounding one-dimensional.
There’s only so much you can
say in 140 characters.

are more than just details. The structure of a network has a profound impact on user behavior. Understanding how these structures drive behavior can help us understand and design systems more effectively. You only need to look at the growing outrage over Facebook’s default settings to understand what’s at stake with something as seemingly mundane as network structure.

The structure of Twitter makes it a great platform for discovering content, finding people who share your interests, and getting connected with people to whom you wouldn’t otherwise have access. It isn’t, however, a great place to have a conversation. But the more we use social networks and develop a shared vocabulary of how structural considerations affect behavior, the better we’ll be able to design products, services, and networks that create whatever kind of conversation space we desire. Christopher Alexander gave us a pattern language of physical, architectural patterns. Now it’s time to create the digital version.

In the meantime, I’ll be clearing the spam out of my inbox, waiting for tomorrow’s mass emails, and hoping they have something more to say.

Conclusion

None of this is intended as a criticism of Twitter. I am a frequent (though not influential) user of Twitter and find the service to be consistently delightful, if a bit distracting. Twitter’s virtues are several, and foremost among them is a refrain commonly repeated in the world of social media: It makes relationships possible that never would have occurred otherwise. Nonetheless, its virtues don’t make it a business panacea, even though you might get that impression from its champions.

Companies and people who decide to give Twitter a try are often baffled by what they find. I’ve had several colleagues tell me over the past year, “I gave Twitter a try, but I just didn’t get it.” Sure enough, Twitter’s usage numbers tell a similar story. (According to a recent study by Barracuda Labs cited in The Wall Street Journal, over a third of registered users have never even Tweeted [ 1].) I can’t help but wonder if those silent users of Twitter were disappointed because they were expecting to find a conversation but found something entirely different.

As products become more complex, designers will need to act more like policy makers or economists, who are concerned with the effects of rules on complex systems. In the world of social networks, default settings and network structure

[ 1] Kafka, P. “Twitter’s
Wallflowers Get a
Little Less Timid. But
It’s Still a Service for
Watchers, Not Talkers.”
MediaMemo. http://
mediamemo.allthingsd.
com/20100310/twitters-
wallflowers-get-a-little-
less-timid-but-its-still-
a-service-for-watchers-
not-talkers/

AbOut the AuthOr
Ben McAllister is a senior
strategist at frog design.
He works in frog’s Austin
studio, where he specializ-
es in design research and
social media. McAllister is also a musician
and songwriter with the Austin band The
Cold Hard Facts of Life. He and his wife,
Eliza, write about food and other things that
interest them at their blog, Chicken Fried
Everything. You can find him on Twitter at
@benmcallister.