Citrus Fortress

“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. … We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”

- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Twitter has announced a new “lists” feature, which will grant the ability to users to play curator and create lists of twitter users under an arbitrary (yet presumably relevant) heading. For instance, I might create a “Social TV” list, and feature people like @kenbot, @mikeberkley, and @tomturnbull, and a “Comedy” List with folks like @danharmon, @azizansari, and @scottsimpson. (There, my #followfriday duties are covered for the week.) If you like my taste, you can then follow one of my lists, which I can manage over time, granting the benefits of my (active) oversight to all my (passive) list subscribers. (In that way it’s not unlike a managed mutual fund, but without the fees.) It’s a great move, allowing for a new class of content-creators that never have to issue a single tweet; they can simply contribute by curating. (Any system which is dependent on users generating the content is well-served by creating multiple points of entry for users to be able engage at the level they feel comfortable with — engagement is a slippery slope.) It also provides a simple yet powerful tool for users to increase the signal to noise ratio of their Twitter experience, which is critical, as anyone following more than ~200 people will tell you.

So yes, “lists” are all well and good, but they only address one half of the issue. We are all many. Whether you call them “masks” or “hats” we all have several we shuffle through each day. Not only are we interested in consuming different categories of content, but we are interested in creating content in different categories as well, thereby presenting specific facets of ourselves to the sundry social spaces we each occupy.  To that end, Twitter should implement some notion of “personae”, in recognition of this idea that each of us are (perhaps subtly) different things within different social contexts, and might like to preserve the separation of those spheres in our social media.

At the most basic level, you might want to simply differentiate between “public” and “private,” leaving the public personae open to the world and using it for more professional updates, while protecting the private update stream from unapproved followers and using for much less formal gabbing about your life. Here’s a slightly more complex scenario: You are a magazine editor, a big fan of the NY Knicks, a single father, and a conspiracy buff. For each of those spheres of interest, there is a pool of people who share your interest, and who may be interested in hearing what you have to say on those topics. In fact, people you know from real life from each of those spheres have found you and are now following you on Twitter. But what do you say? For each audience different content is appropriate; trying to be all things to all of your social contexts will lead to a watered-down compromise at best, and complete paralysis at worst.

With a “personae” system, you could create multiple personae and choose which to post under on a per-tweet basis. (Of course, you could always just choose the default of “all.”) Your followers (and list-makers who choose to include you) would actually be adding personae, rather than people, so your Knicks posts could be on a Knicks Fans list, while your posts about Area 51 appear in the conspiracy list. At the same time, your best friend, who is subscribed to all your personae (what a mensch!) sees it all.

Of course you can approximate this functionality now by creating different accounts for each persona, but that seems like a clumsy way to address an issue that affects the vast majority of users.

For any given posting, we have a certain audience in mind, yet inevitably the imagined audience is just a subset of the actual audience. Has this happened to you: Someone responds to something you’ve posted on Twitter or Facebook and you’re stunned: “Whoa, that was not intended for you at all!” Our friends/followers are a diverse group, occupying highly variable levels not only of “closeness” but also of social context, and it’s often easy to forget just how diverse. Or, conversely, have you ever not posted something because it would seem unprofessional, or not funny enough, or would in whatever way undermine the expectations & perceptions of what you consider your ‘primary’ audience? A “personae” system would address both of these issues, freeing up users to express each of their personae as fully and strongly as they see fit, simultaneously honing multiple personal “brands” as it were,  without having to worry about the dilution of the value of their stream for their followers who are only interested in one or another aspect, and summarily improve the quality of content for everyone.

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digital, musings by Tony Zito