QotW7: Twitter - Online Community?

What makes up a community? It mostly refers to a sociological group in a large place or collection of people (or other organisms) sharing an environment. [Community, 2007] Judging from such an explanation or definition, does Twitter fit into these criteria? Seems like it does. In Twitter, people are linked to one another sharing an environment, in this case, the networking site itself. Most of the time people are linked to one another based on a similar interest, or any other things that they have in common. In my case, for instance, the people under my Twitter friend list are all BAC students of UB-SIM. That is our similarity.

How Twitter functions is also similar to what we know as Reputation Management, which is the “process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop”. [Reputation Management, 2007] What we do in Twitter is basically telling others what we are doing, and others would express their opinions and react to these messages as well, and then we might react to their reactions, hence, forming a cycle.

Fernback and Thompson mentioned in their article that “the structural process that is associated with community is communication. Without communication there can be no action to organize social relations. The intimate nature of this relationship is best illustrated in the words community and communications”. [Frenback & Thompson, 1995] In other words, communication is the key, which is basically what Twitter is all about. Twitter fits in this very description almost literally, as all that we do up there is to tell others what we are doing, describing it in WORDS. And then people respond accordingly: COMMUNICATION. Although Twitter may not have functions as elaborate as compared to Friendster or MySpace, it does serve a very similar purpose when it comes to social interaction and virtual interpersonal relationships. It is pretty much an online community in its own right.

There is a general understanding that in an ideal community, people are supposed to be getting along well with one another, and even help one another whenever needed. Here is a case-study of how people have actually helped one another through Twitter: A guy had lost his wallet and then made a Twitter post about his wallet being missing. The person who found his wallet happened to see his Twitter post about it and because of that, he was able to return the missing wallet to its rightful owner. [Mike, 2007] This may not be a common case that happens everyday, but it does prove a point; that Twitter functions just like a normal community, to the point that someone’s lost item can actually be found through it instead of having to rely on the authorities who would probably take much longer to solve the matter without any guarantee that the item can be found intact as it is.

Now that we have looked at Twitter using the above-mentioned descriptions and definitions, as well as the case study of the anecdotal experience by some users, we can very well sum up that Twitter is indeed an online community.




References:

Fernback J., Thompson B. (May 1995). Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure? retrieved March 15, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Reputation Management. (2007). Reputation Management. In Wikipedia [Web]. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management

Community. (2007). Community. In Wikipedia [Web]. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community

Mike (March 12, 2007). Release - Lost and Found. Retrieved March 15, 2007, from http://perpetualbeta.com/release/archives/2007/03/12/lost-and-found/