Citrus Fortress

Twitter can be viewed as an infinitely overlapping structure of reverse panopticons, with each participant at the center of his/her own universe, with no visibility outward back to the people who are watching them. There is no “conversation” per se (without a tedious, forensic reconstruction process), as each participant is experiencing and responding to a very different messaging landscape. In such a chaotic landscape, shared norms (a key component of a “community”) cannot emerge. For example, if I follow a bunch of dirty-mouthed comedians (as I do), I might easily get the sense that the ethos of Twitter is wild, profane, and uncompromisingly edgy. But then when I comment in kind, I may well shock the sensibilities of (say) the internet development professionals that follow me. Now multiply this dissonance by the number of individual nodes in the network, and you have a custerfluck of epic proportions, with millions of people shouting together, alone.

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.

Well, sort of. Nearby Tweets just uses the location you stated at registration time, but it’s a very cool user-discovery feature nonetheless. I love an app like this — it does one thing, and does it well. It throws a simple user interface on something that was already available in the twitter API (thanks for [...]