Thanks for sending this fabulous paper, danah - Danah + colleagues' paper provides lots of really good examples that underscore the socio-cultural complexities of retweeting - and to the point here, specifically what will be lost in Twitter's own redesign of the RT syntax. Twitters redesigned syntax -- Described here -- http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html --drops the identity of the sender of the RT as a communicative agent out of the RT message. This break in the social economy of Twitter's crowd sourcing network eliminates the additional information provided by the linkage between the author-A- of the tweet that gets retweeted by Sender-B - and that information, in the case of my own use of Twitter, is specifically and importantly part of the reputational economy that tells me fairly reliably - Sender B provides very reliable information about blogs and consumer health info - for example - therefore, I will likely want to take 5 seconds and click on this URL. If I don't know author-A - and this is how the retweet will show up in Twitter's new design -- as a message from someone I don't actually follow - the likelihood that I will look at the URL is close to zero. Much <intelligence> is lost in this redesign. Mary
From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:15:44 -0500 To: Mary Bryson <mary.bryson@ubc.ca> Cc: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twitter Re-Design
I share your disappointment. Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan, and I investigated retweeting practices in the spring and summer and found a whole plethora of different practices that are not supported by this implementation. We wrote this up in a HICSS paper that will be published and presented in January, but we've made a draft version available for those who want to know more about retweeting:
Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter danah boyd, Scott Golder, Gilad Lotan HICSS 2010 http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf
Enjoy!
danah
On Nov 11, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:
RE: Why Retweet works the way it does
http://evhead.com/2009/11/why-retweet-works-way-it-does.html <BY: Evan Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American entrepreneur who has founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, of which he is currently CEO.>
I think it's interesting that Ev <creator of Twitter> misses the most valued function of the retweet <to this user>, which is the linkage between the retweeter and the original author of the RT tweet - the creator of Twitter's new modification of retweet removes the citation factor - The current Twitter syntax of say, Richard Smith retweeting something about surveillance and blogging makes me follow a link about say, blogging, precisely because Richard Smith is citing it. For the URL simply to appear in my InBox from ZX would be meaningless. This is a good example of where a tool designer fails to talk to users about what is good about the actual design and what would then, be lost in the supposed "improvement".
Mary -- Dr. Mary K. Bryson, Professor and Director, Network of Centers and Institutes in Education (NCIE) & Center for Cross-Faculty Inquiry (CCFI), Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia Archive: http://ubc.academia.edu/MaryKBryson
CCFI: Innovation Works Here http://ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------
"taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ @zephoria