Understanding the Psychology of Twitter
Understanding the psychology of Twitter...
Essentially, Twitter is an automated service for sharing of short 140-character communications. Why the 140 character limit? So you can send tweets from your cell phone as well as your computer. Pretty much every major celebrity has a twitter channel, from Britney Spears to Stephen Coubert and John Cleese, as the system has become the promotional channel du jour. In fact, Twitter's greatest challenge is the risk of collapsing under its own weight, as servers crash due to the unprecedented volume of traffic and the complexity of revenue models beckon.
Some feel that Twitter is the killer app for killing time, filling any moment with useless drivel - "boy, I love lightly scrambled eggs", "appletini or dirty martini? reply now to tell what I should order", "stop & shop is out of weight watchers brownies, but price chopper has 'em." I mean, it's crazy. NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program even figured out how to get plants to twitter when they're thirsty!
Most interesting is how the Twitter system acts to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The unfortunate reality is that we are a culture starved for real community. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have resided in tribes of about 30-70 people. Our brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival.
However, the tribal context of life was subverted during the Industrial Revolution, when the extended family was torn apart in order to move laborers into the cities. But a deep evolutionary need for community continues to express itself, through feelings of community generated by your workplace, your church, your sports team, and now... the twitterverse. This is why people feel so compelled to tweet, to facebook or even to check their email incessantly. We crave connection.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
It's useful to dig a bit deeper into our need for community. In fact, needs analysis one of the most powerful tools for innovators to understand, which invariably leads to the meaning of their products. So let's look at Twitter in the context of Abraham Maslow's concept of a hierarchy of needs, first presented in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation."
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid, with lowest levels of the pyramid made up of the most basic needs and more complex needs are at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to higher levels of needs, which become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment become important. Finally, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.
Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.
An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter. Twitter allows normal people to feel like celebrities. At its worst, Twitter is an exercise in unconditional narcissism - the idea that others might actually care about the minutiae of our daily lives. I believe that this phenomena of micro-celebrity is driven by existential anxiety. I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggoneit, people like me!
"We are the most narcissistic age ever," agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it."
This leads me to a few other problems I have with Twitter and social activity monitoring in general. First, it makes it much easier for stalkers to follow you. Stalkers give me the willies, and better tools need to be in place to identify those you don't want following your every move. However, in Los Angeles, most people celebrate their first official stalker as a benchmark of success. Second, there is a remarkable loss of focus and presence that comes with the information overload that multi-tasking brings. Twitter is like digital crack that invariably turns you into a tweetker - no matter how much of it you get, you'll never be satisfied. If you've ever woken up at 3 am to check your email or read tweets, you know what I mean. You know the cold clammy fingers of existential anxiety.
Self-Actualization via Tweets
A more valuable technology tool for humanity might be the opposite of Twitter - an application that removes distractions from life, reconnects you to real relationships and human touch, and helps you find the time to focus on what really matters in life. It's an old joke, "Second Life, heck! I can't even keep up with my first one!"
Which leads me to return to the remaining highest level in the Maslovian hierarchy of needs - how people might use Twitter to self-actualize. Currently, there are over 200 marketing guru's teaching about how to use Twitter as a marketing channel. How far behind could the spiritual guru's be? The spiritually ubiquitous Deepak Chopra has a twitter channel. So does the motivational guru Tony Robbins. Existential psychology theory explains that the core tendency of the self-actualizing person is to achieve authentic being. Can Twitter possibly aid in achieving authentic being, or is it fundamentally "mitwelt" - reinforcing the social and interpersonal aspects of life, and thus a distraction from "eigenwelt" - where the treasure of the self is hidden? What would Rollo May do? What would Heidegger say?
Perhaps this is the highest meaning of Twitter: it's really just a massive social art project. It's really nothing more than a fun and immersive conceptual art installation about humanity and by humanity, composed of individual 140 character haikus. (In fact, there's even a name for the perfect tweet haiku... twoosh! It's when your tweet hits exactly 140 characters and makes that sound. Tweet + swoosh. Nothing but net.) In fact, all the twooshes in the world add up into a giant global pachinko machine, made all the more addictive because Twitter's software designers were clever enough to program in tenacious intermittent reward systems, so you end up like a loser in Vegas, behaviorally trapped at the slot machines of life.
Ask yourself, when you twitter, are you tweeting like a caged bird or exclaiming your passion and enjoying the spaciality of existence? Medard Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist who developed daseinsanalysis and who coined the term, wrote, "Openness constitutes the true nature of spatiality in the human world. I am more open to my distant friend and he is clearer to me than my neighbor is." Isn't that exactly what the openness of the Internet enables - making distant friends clearer than the neighbor next door?
Perhaps the key distinction lies in whether you are truly enjoying humanity's meta-haiku, or is the motivation to twitter actually a fear of being alone? Kierkegaard once said that true heroism is "daring to be entirely oneself, alone before God." Is Twitter actually powered by a global case of monophobia?
Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is that you aren't adding to the spam or garbage-in-garbage-out overload, you're really just enjoying a cyber-zen moment of mindfulness to be present and tweet thyself. We're all interconnected now - each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, firing bits of electricity at one another, slowly coadunating and collectively struggling toward a great awakening. That awakening could turn out to be the next stage in our evolution, and a single tweet the butterfly's wings that eventually leads to a big bang of global meta-consciousness.
To me, the twitterverse is like a river of human awareness, composed of billions of tiny 140 character molecules - each a snapshot of life or a thought or a reflection. A river of pure information that equals energy, according to the laws of quantum thermodynamics and stochastic processes. A river of life flowing by us as we meditate at its bank like some Siddhartha wannabe, in tattered jeans and Oakley sunglasses instead of orchid robes and begging bowl. And now, after long last, we see.
We see the beauty of the river, that some now call ambient awareness.
We reach in and touch the water of human consciousness.
Little eddies form - those are called tweetclouds.
We can be one with the river.
Or not.
It's all good.
PS, here's a link to Part II of this article where we delve into issues like the neuroscience of twittering, advanced usage, psycholinguistics of emotional communication and empathy.
Finally, if you'd like to watch a delightful cartoon editorial about the Twitter rage, go to: Current TV's season premiere of SuperNews!, the Twouble with Twitter.
In my last article on the social phenomenon of Twitter, I described its information stream as a river of human consciousness. Following this analogy, I found that most people simply dip a toe in to gauge the tweetgeist, but I can't help notice that advanced users are pretty happy out there, swimming in the deep part of the twitter waters. New Twitter user @maartenelout describes a typical beginner's experience, "10 minutes a day max to scan what's been floating by, find interesting blog posts and leave a tweet, more than that drives me nuts..." Amrita Grace, who hasn't even ventured into the Twitter waters yet, remarks, "I have not dared to go there yet......I'm concerned about the time suck.....scary!"However, advanced swimmers, like @DougH, sing a different, more confident tune. I asked Doug how he managed to collect over 13,000 followers and generate over 20,000 posts. He notes, "I started out be following people I knew directly. Then from there I looked at follower lists of people who were in PR and marketing like me, to find like-minded people to network with. At one point - somewhere around 300-700 followers - it hit a kind of critical mass, and I didn't need to actively seek out followers anymore. The network grew by itself from there. It took about two years to get to where I am now, investing about an hour a day twittering."
But why go to so much trouble when it's such a significant "time suck"? Well, according to research by @indymike, Twitter users who leverage it as a marketing channel experience an average 4% clickthrough rate. Now, compared to the .1% clickthrough rate on FaceBook, you can see why so many PR and marketing types are rushing to Twitter. It's well over an order of magnitude more effective for marketing and promotion. Plus, it's still free, so it's the new digital land grab. Get your forty cyber-acres while you can!
My Experiment
I decided to jump in and see what it might be like in the deeper part of the river - sink or swim. Well, the current is pretty strong out there. However, Twitter usage manages its own learning curve by matching the numbers of followers and followees you have. A newbie, like me, would normally have only a few dozen follows, generating a post every few minutes. But a heavy twitter user, with 10,000 follows and followers, might be processing something like a post per second. It's a bewildering rate of information; most twitter users don't even use the concept of backlog, like in email.
Following some trusted tweet advisors, I installed Tweetdeck - sort of a Bloomberg for trading tweets. With this power tool and two large monitors, I was able to follow and keep up with a half dozen simultaneous conversations... all while monitoring email, Facebook and trying to get work done on the side. The effect is quite mesmerizing and I fell into a peak experience of social networking.
A few empirical observations about swimming in the deep end:
First, it's genuinely an addictive process. I used to design videogames, so I'm pretty good at tuning gameplay "action"... Twitter is definitely designed to encourage addictive usage. When I designed games, we would measure eyeblink rates to see if the player was entering a state of "flow" during gameplay. If the blink rate dropped precipitously after a few minutes of play, the game would most likely be a hit. And if you test a heavy twitter user in the same way, I'll bet that a similar thing is happening - a drop in the blink rate, some pupil dilation, and a surge in neuro-adrenaline.
Second, Twitter differs from regular chatrooms and instant messaging because it removes the idea of boundaries. In a chatroom, you can see that you're in a room titled "Golf in the Kingdom" and there are 25 people. So you can get a sense of the crowd and subject matter. In Twitter, no such virtual boundaries exist... you're simply talking into the stream, and anyone at all might talk back. The more followers you have, the greater the likelihood that somebody's listening, but it's much more like CB radio than a cocktail party. You simply don't know who's listening or might reply... and there are absolutely no moderators out there.
Third, on the Internet, you run into all sorts of interesting people. But on Twitter, you do it so much faster. Once I installed Tweetdeck, I only spent four hours twittering in high speed, but managed to interact with perhaps ten times the normal number of people I'd expect to run into via chatrooms. The innovation guru John Kao once told me that serendipity is what makes innovation go faster... and often wished for a serendipity pedal that he could step on to increase random connections at companies. Twitter is serendipity on steroids.
I started my experiment tuning into the #haiku channel. @twitterhaiku wrote:
twitter followers...
from all over the planet...
how cool! hello, all!
Another entry, a bit more prosaic but reminiscent of the typical tweet, by @keithvassallo:
went to the movies...
saw monsters vs aliens...
nacho cheese was cold
I contributed one:
I sit and twitter
talking to everybody
and nobody too
This is cool. Kind of fun. Then I watched what was happening in #innovation. (Not much.) And then I chitchatted with people at random, as they flowed by. Eventually, I ran into a very intellectually stimulating woman named Alexa, and chatted with her while allowing myself to feel a little smitten for a bit. Yeah, this is definitely entertaining.
Then I ran into a glitch. As a newbie, I had mixed up reply with direct reply. It's a twitter faux pas equivalent to leaving the microphone on after a speech. A couple of kind souls explained what I was doing wrong and after clarifying the UI, I was able to turn off the mic. However, one power user - whose online personal is somewhat reminiscent of Meryl Streep's character in the film Doubt - decided to raise a virtual pitchfork and literally banish me from twitterland (known as a "suspension"). She was relentless, ignoring every apology and gesture of peace, and even stalked me on the web for a bit... a bit like someone who missed taking her meds.
For me, it was kind of exciting, "Wow, my first hatetweet! I'm finally a celebrity!"
But all joking aside, there are some power users out there who are deadly serious about their little corner of the twitterverse, and emotional flareups can happen with just as much intensity as email flaming. This brings me to the primary thesis of this article, that twitter is significant because it amplifies whatever effect computer interactivity has on people... Twitter is the first tweetch game of social networking.
The Neurophysiology of Twitter
In fact, there's a neuroscientist saying that there is a neurophysiological basis for such concerns. The Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, recently testified to members of the British government that social network sites risk "infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity". (Ref: The Guardian)
Greenfield told the House of Lords that social network sites are putting attention spans in jeopardy, warning: "If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction... such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder. It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in [such] technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder."
More importantly, Lady Greenfield also warned there is a risk of loss of empathy, which I believe is due to the fact that in cyber life, you can't see the subtle emotional cues on the faces of your victims as you send off that deliciously sarcastic email or get someone suspended for the hell of it. In linguistic theory, there are these rich facial and auditory gestures called phatics. It's the nod of the head or "uh huh" that tells the speaker that you're getting the message, it's clear-to-send, so keep it coming.
With face to face communications, the speaker is able to rely on the expression of the slightest note of distress on the listener's face, or even the silence on the phone, to realize that something he or she just said upset the listener. You know that silence. It's when your heart starts palpitating and you whine into your Bluetooth headset, "Honey? Honey? Are you there? Are you mad at me?"
That dance of rich metalinguistic feedback allows complex emotional communication to flow optimally, and without it, we end up with a worst case senario for humanity that Lady Greenfield envisions. The real world of touch and phatics and eye gazing provides emotional richness that simply does not exist in the cyberworld.
If the minds of our children are reinforced by too much twitter time and not enough running around in the backyard time, slowly trained to operate without metalinguistic nuances... is there a chance we'll raise a generation of kids with Asperger's syndrome? Are we inexorably marching toward a dystopian future, promising an ample supply of virtual flamewars, limited empathy, borderline personalities, and who knows... maybe even the key ingredient for an entire series of Columbine massacres?
Now ask yourself, in order to see where Lady Greenfield is coming from, how much more emotionally limited can you be, than in a cyberverse limited to 140 characters?
Personally, I think that Lady Greenfield is overstating the risk. I think that the situation is similar to the development of freeways. Imagine transporting someone from the 1900s, and sticking them behind the wheel of a car today, speeding down the freeway... Obviously, it would be a terrifying experience for our time traveler. Now, ask yourself, could someone in the 19th century even imagine a world where millions of teenagers happily drive down such freeways while applying lipstick?
The human brain is an amazingly adaptive system, and will surely be able to accommodate virtually any acceleration of information and scope of multi-tasking over time. In twenty years, we humans will adapt to handle what now looks like an indigestible volume of information without even breaking a sweat... you can bet on that, for sure.
The Twitter Singularity?
Perhaps Twitter is even part of our evolutionary process, like that initial adaptation we now call neuro-plasticity during that first evolutionary venture, during that first mutation of brain cells? For those who don't feel like looking it up on wikipedia, neuro-plasticity relates to how the brain learns, by adding or removing connections, or adding cells. Researchers have discovered that norepinephrine, a neuro-adrenaline dubbed "the stress hormone", increases brain plasticity. But that's kind of obvious... when you're life's threatened, of course your brain is going to want to remember everything that's just about to happen.
Perhaps our brains, in a similar way, require stress and pressure to expand its capacities, and so we are now being pushed by new applications like Twitter to increase our base processing speeds – enabling a global network of brains that advance in lock step with the increasing speed of computer processors and search engines? Like the boundary-less twitterverse, where exactly is the boundary between our brains and the Internet?
Wow, big questions, huh? As for me, I'm leaning toward quitting the twitting. R.D. Laing once said, "Mystics and schizophrenics find themselves in the same ocean, but the mystics swim whereas the schizophrenics drown." The same could be said for the Internet and this river of human awareness. Twitter really is a significant time sink, and honestly, I'm more Zen than zap these days. I prefer to be the mystic reflecting quietly on my life and coming up with "My 25 List" on Facebook, than multitasking myself into a schizophrenic, shouting to everybody and nobody at the same time, listening to voices in the aether.
Thanks for reading!
Here's a link to Part III of this article where I share the results of our survey on Twitter usage, and providing concluding thoughts.
I promised a number of Twitter users who befriended me that I'd share the findings of the survey I launched about twitter usage. And so, I thought I'd wrap up this three part article on the Psychology of Twitter by discussing the results of the survey and sharing a few final observations about this new modality for compressed communication.Here is the my first article on the social phenomenon of Twitter and here is the followup article that dealt with the neurophysiological aspect of twittering.
So, let's talk about the survey. We received 63 responses, with people contributing major essays about twitter usage. So it's more of an in-depth ethnographic study than a longitudinal study. Of these users, 83% identified themselves as moderate to heavy users of Twitter. One user said, "I spurt, so I go from heavy to moderate usage - sometimes my life is more interesting than others :D" The average respondent has about 1000 followers, and has tweeted about 1500 times. The most popular tweeter had 17,000 followers.
Now, as to reasons for twittering... the number one reason - stated by 56% of the respondents - was because it's fun. This was followed by 50% saying they do it to meet new people, and 44% saying they do it to stay in touch with friends. And a full 42% use it as a marketing channel. And a small number are using it to track keyword trends or twitter meme (aka twemes). Using the # function, people are looking for others for professional and non-professional colleagues to network with. Another user stated, "I'm self employed and often work from home. it's my virtual water cooler." Yet another heavy user says, "Twitter has completely changed my life. I've found new friends thanks twitter, I've found several jobs thanks twitter." Another user agrees that Twitter is not a bad channel for finding work, "I found a client through Twitter for the first time. I now get many job offers a week." A third user shared a sentiment that captures the value of Twitter quite well, "It's the best anti depressant on the market. And it's free!!"
Since I brought up the idea of a Maslovian hierarchy around Twitter, I thought I'd ask where on the pyramid our users were playing. The primary impacts were entertainment & creativity (in the high 70s), followed by "gaining a sense of belonging", self-actualization and livelihood (I expect this means all the savvy twitter marketers out there). Interestingly, finding love ranked VERY low. Some examples include, "My best friends are on twitter. Every time I need advice, help, suggestions or to inform them what Im gonna do, I do it that way." An artist/designer shares, "When I needed positive feedback on one of my new designs (I was at the point that I was about to give up), I asked the opinion of my followers, and I was met with immense positive reactions. The design was a success!" This shows that the difficult path of the artist can be supported by community.
In terms of self esteem, one user shared, "When I discovered that I was a total stranger's 'first follow', it totally boosted my self esteem!" She continues to share, rather poignantly, "I do sometimes use Twitter as emotional anesthesia: When my life as a stay at home mom to 6 children under 10 has its truly absurd moments, it can help to tweet a general cry of despair. It helps me to step back, and not take everything so seriously." Another shares, "When people retweet my blog posts or put me on a #followfriday, I feel very validated." It's amazing how people interpret the number of followers as an indication of social status, sometimes, as a validation of yourself in life.
In terms of assuaging despair, one user shared something quite interesting, "When my grandmother died, my friends sent supportive tweets to me. It was easier - emotionally - reading their messages, than it would have been receiving phone calls from them." That's something I never considered... that certain forms of communication are emotionally less trying than others.
For me, the most interesting responses were, "Twitter gives me a vague sense of myself as an entity who's left a trail in time and space", and "I look at Twitter as a casual diary or log or journal, providing a narrative for my life." There's definitely some existential angst being relieved by twittering, as it provides a way to validate yourself and type into the ether, "I am! I exist! I like yogurt!"
So that brings us to it. I asked people to share their deepest philosophical insights about Twitter, and they came through. My fave was "Twitter is so revealing. It's addictive, frivolous and exposes our depth (or lack of it) in the space of 140*infinity characters." Very Zen. Another advises, "Twitter is like an enormous cocktail party. Just don't barge in and start talking about yourself!" Another: "Jung was right about the collective consciousness! Perhaps not in the ways he'd dreamt, though." One user shared a particularly pithy review, "Twitter is simply a communication tool that greatly decreases the friction that time, place and meeting contributes to communication. Its primary contribution to social change is the unpredictable transmission patterns and velocities of ideas, moods and memes through the social network."
Here's another brilliant observation: "I have two philosophical observations... First, Twitter serves a vital individualistic function of announcing an open communication channel. The act of twittering, regardless of content, communicates that this person is ready to engage. The maintenance of open channels, or awareness of when they are closed, can be an overlooked aspect of communication. Second, with each tweet by each new user, we are learning to become a more transparent culture. I used to maintain separate identities in separate circles, but my stress levels went way down when I just started representing myself as a single identity and learning to share. Twitter is an excellent tool for this because of the opt-out, asymmetrical nature of the follow network."
A Myers-Briggs Certified Administrator shared, "I believe a lot of people in the Twitterverse are not behaving according to their type in the social media world. This forum allows those who do not normally openly network or get out in larger social audiences to feel completely comfortable in the privacy of their home or office by themselves to connect in ways they wouldn't in person. Many of us who DO enjoy the face to face networking and exposure are struggling with social media because we want the face to face connection as much as we want the networking." An astute observation.
Some negative comments were interesting. For example, "Bottom line... narcissistic all over the board! It's not so much that everyone has issues and comes to twitter. It's a very strange phenomenon that is occurring in this arena." Or this contribution: "Lifestreaming is not my thing; I don't care what every celeb and his dog had for breakfast. I enjoy the intellectual community of like-minded individuals who can add insight and material to my writing and teaching." Here's one more: "Twitter is yet another technology that has the potential to distract us and leave us less time for deep thinking and deep relationships. Google may not be 'making us stoopid' (to quote Nicholas Carr) but Twitter could."
But one user summed it up perfectly, "I think we are all trying to organize the new information age. We want to establish our online existence, and all these social networking sites are helping us do that. This will pass and one day become just part of life. We will all be given a place on the internet at birth, and all our virtual world will be connected at that place. We all have to express ourselves, in one way or another. Currently people do so mostly by pretending to be social marketing experts, or by showing their cleverness in finding cool websites made by others. But soon we will have art and music and other kind of expressions more easily coming through."
Finally, there was a cute comment in response to my proposition that each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, slowly struggling toward a great awakening. The respondent shared, "I haven't been using Twitter for very long, but am starting to feel like a well-connected neuron enjoying the ability to selectively develop synapses in a virtual global cortex." Funny!
I'll finish up this three part article by sharing that I believe that the sense of meaning and meaninglessness are actually internally generated mental states. In fact, the sense of meaning may be an evolutionary adaptation to increase our survival. The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) based his life's work on the belief that humans were able to find meaning even in the most horrific circumstances. Frankl was incarcerated in Auschwitz during World War II, where he observed that fellow inmates with a developed sense of spiritual meaning were far more likely to survive. His work tells us that without this sense of meaning, our capacity to withstand profound trauma is significantly diminished.
For example, why is a sunset beautiful? Why does a redder sunset trigger a sense of meaning and beatitude? I believe that it's because we are carbon-based machines that generate meaning. Currently, research is being done to explore the involvement of endorphins in depression, in how they might be involved in detachment, dispassion, and emotional numbness. Where is the research on the neurophysiology of contentment, peace and fulfillment? What is the effect of elevated oxytocin? Perhaps it's released during childbirth to imbue a sense of great meaning on both parents to help insure the survival of infants? And how's it all fit with peak experiences, kundalini, states of samadhi?
So if someone tweets, "I'm at Trader Joe's and remembering that I LOVE greek yogurt", it could seem pretty banal to most, or it could appear as a beautiful haiku or an amazing koan to others.
Try this experiment with me... let's tweak our mindstate around internet interactivity and the generation of the sense of meaning... just keep reading and open yourself to the possibility of changing your mindstate at will, as we enter a guided visualization...
When I see a singing bird, I can feel the beauty of life. Now see that twitter tweets are simply the songs of this odd and beautiful species called homo sapien. Now imagine the millions of twitter users, each in their own beautiful and tragic and tearful and happy road of "pain and then no pain". Let this feeling of beauty multiply, like maybe after years of traveling - you arrive at a place in time and space, so you can experience an entire rainforest of rare birds in song.
In such a state of techno-satori, all we can see is beauty, so every tweet is beautiful. Even the poor spammers trying to put food on the table - we feel their desperation during this recession, and our response is compassion. And now, it all begins to hold an increasing level of meaning. Or rather, we are now creating the hormones that generate a sense of meaning, and inject this sense of meaning into every tweet, and we feel greater and greater respect for every tweeting bird in the forest of humanity. With every tweet you read, you allow yourself to feel the complete totality of humanity within that person behind the tweet. Their pains, their joys. Open yourself to respecting and loving each and every profile picture in Twitter you see. Be the Dalai Lama. Let agape or bliss or wisdom overwhelm you and flow that divine love and respect to every being on your Tweetdeck screen, to every being using Twitter, to every being on the Internet, to every being in the world.
At this point, something funny happens... this sense of meaning turns around, and finally, I am able to see the meaning and beauty in what I am writing right now, right here, with these words - as I finally see that I am not an observer, but a participant in this immense beauty that is life. Now let that sense of meaning turn around again, and see your own meaning as you participate in the amazing twittering dance of life by ten billon neurons in your brain, by ten billion people on this planet, by ten billion planets with sentient life in our universe, by ten billion universes that occur over and over as the universe implodes and big bangs every 100 billion years or so.
It's all so incredibly beautiful! You are beautiful! Tweet away.
Thanks for reading this series of articles about Twitter! Next week, I'll return to discussing the psychology of innovation...
And I apologize that I wasn't able to provide @eddresses for the quotes, due to the limitations of my survey software. So if you'd like to take credit for your quote, just add a comment and supply your twitter address for people to follow! And thanks for participating!
Some feel that Twitter is the killer app for killing time, filling any moment with useless drivel - "boy, I love lightly scrambled eggs", "appletini or dirty martini? reply now to tell what I should order", "stop & shop is out of weight watchers brownies, but price chopper has 'em." I mean, it's crazy. NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program even figured out how to get plants to twitter when they're thirsty!Most interesting is how the Twitter system acts to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The unfortunate reality is that we are a culture starved for real community. For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have resided in tribes of about 30-70 people. Our brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival.
However, the tribal context of life was subverted during the Industrial Revolution, when the extended family was torn apart in order to move laborers into the cities. But a deep evolutionary need for community continues to express itself, through feelings of community generated by your workplace, your church, your sports team, and now... the twitterverse. This is why people feel so compelled to tweet, to facebook or even to check their email incessantly. We crave connection.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
It's useful to dig a bit deeper into our need for community. In fact, needs analysis one of the most powerful tools for innovators to understand, which invariably leads to the meaning of their products. So let's look at Twitter in the context of Abraham Maslow's concept of a hierarchy of needs, first presented in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation."Maslow's hierarchy of needs is most often displayed as a pyramid, with lowest levels of the pyramid made up of the most basic needs and more complex needs are at the top of the pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are basic physical requirements including the need for food, water, sleep and warmth. Once these lower-level needs have been met, people can move on to higher levels of needs, which become increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the need for love, friendship and intimacy become important. Further up the pyramid, the need for personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment become important. Finally, Maslow emphasized the importance of self-actualization, which is a process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.
Twitter aims primarily at social needs, like those for belonging, love, and affection. Relationships such as friendships, romantic attachments and families help fulfill this need for companionship and acceptance, as does involvement in social, community or religious groups. Clearly, feeling connected to people via Twitter helps to fulfill some of this need to belong and feel cared about.
An even higher level of need, related to self-esteem and social recognition, is also leveraged by Twitter. Twitter allows normal people to feel like celebrities. At its worst, Twitter is an exercise in unconditional narcissism - the idea that others might actually care about the minutiae of our daily lives. I believe that this phenomena of micro-celebrity is driven by existential anxiety. I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggoneit, people like me!
"We are the most narcissistic age ever," agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it."
This leads me to a few other problems I have with Twitter and social activity monitoring in general. First, it makes it much easier for stalkers to follow you. Stalkers give me the willies, and better tools need to be in place to identify those you don't want following your every move. However, in Los Angeles, most people celebrate their first official stalker as a benchmark of success. Second, there is a remarkable loss of focus and presence that comes with the information overload that multi-tasking brings. Twitter is like digital crack that invariably turns you into a tweetker - no matter how much of it you get, you'll never be satisfied. If you've ever woken up at 3 am to check your email or read tweets, you know what I mean. You know the cold clammy fingers of existential anxiety.
Self-Actualization via Tweets
A more valuable technology tool for humanity might be the opposite of Twitter - an application that removes distractions from life, reconnects you to real relationships and human touch, and helps you find the time to focus on what really matters in life. It's an old joke, "Second Life, heck! I can't even keep up with my first one!"
Which leads me to return to the remaining highest level in the Maslovian hierarchy of needs - how people might use Twitter to self-actualize. Currently, there are over 200 marketing guru's teaching about how to use Twitter as a marketing channel. How far behind could the spiritual guru's be? The spiritually ubiquitous Deepak Chopra has a twitter channel. So does the motivational guru Tony Robbins. Existential psychology theory explains that the core tendency of the self-actualizing person is to achieve authentic being. Can Twitter possibly aid in achieving authentic being, or is it fundamentally "mitwelt" - reinforcing the social and interpersonal aspects of life, and thus a distraction from "eigenwelt" - where the treasure of the self is hidden? What would Rollo May do? What would Heidegger say?
Perhaps this is the highest meaning of Twitter: it's really just a massive social art project. It's really nothing more than a fun and immersive conceptual art installation about humanity and by humanity, composed of individual 140 character haikus. (In fact, there's even a name for the perfect tweet haiku... twoosh! It's when your tweet hits exactly 140 characters and makes that sound. Tweet + swoosh. Nothing but net.) In fact, all the twooshes in the world add up into a giant global pachinko machine, made all the more addictive because Twitter's software designers were clever enough to program in tenacious intermittent reward systems, so you end up like a loser in Vegas, behaviorally trapped at the slot machines of life.
Ask yourself, when you twitter, are you tweeting like a caged bird or exclaiming your passion and enjoying the spaciality of existence? Medard Boss, a Swiss psychiatrist who developed daseinsanalysis and who coined the term, wrote, "Openness constitutes the true nature of spatiality in the human world. I am more open to my distant friend and he is clearer to me than my neighbor is." Isn't that exactly what the openness of the Internet enables - making distant friends clearer than the neighbor next door?
Perhaps the key distinction lies in whether you are truly enjoying humanity's meta-haiku, or is the motivation to twitter actually a fear of being alone? Kierkegaard once said that true heroism is "daring to be entirely oneself, alone before God." Is Twitter actually powered by a global case of monophobia?
Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is that you aren't adding to the spam or garbage-in-garbage-out overload, you're really just enjoying a cyber-zen moment of mindfulness to be present and tweet thyself. We're all interconnected now - each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, firing bits of electricity at one another, slowly coadunating and collectively struggling toward a great awakening. That awakening could turn out to be the next stage in our evolution, and a single tweet the butterfly's wings that eventually leads to a big bang of global meta-consciousness.To me, the twitterverse is like a river of human awareness, composed of billions of tiny 140 character molecules - each a snapshot of life or a thought or a reflection. A river of pure information that equals energy, according to the laws of quantum thermodynamics and stochastic processes. A river of life flowing by us as we meditate at its bank like some Siddhartha wannabe, in tattered jeans and Oakley sunglasses instead of orchid robes and begging bowl. And now, after long last, we see.
We see the beauty of the river, that some now call ambient awareness.
We reach in and touch the water of human consciousness.
Little eddies form - those are called tweetclouds.
We can be one with the river.
Or not.
It's all good.
PS, here's a link to Part II of this article where we delve into issues like the neuroscience of twittering, advanced usage, psycholinguistics of emotional communication and empathy.
Finally, if you'd like to watch a delightful cartoon editorial about the Twitter rage, go to: Current TV's season premiere of SuperNews!, the Twouble with Twitter.
In my last article on the social phenomenon of Twitter, I described its information stream as a river of human consciousness. Following this analogy, I found that most people simply dip a toe in to gauge the tweetgeist, but I can't help notice that advanced users are pretty happy out there, swimming in the deep part of the twitter waters. New Twitter user @maartenelout describes a typical beginner's experience, "10 minutes a day max to scan what's been floating by, find interesting blog posts and leave a tweet, more than that drives me nuts..." Amrita Grace, who hasn't even ventured into the Twitter waters yet, remarks, "I have not dared to go there yet......I'm concerned about the time suck.....scary!"However, advanced swimmers, like @DougH, sing a different, more confident tune. I asked Doug how he managed to collect over 13,000 followers and generate over 20,000 posts. He notes, "I started out be following people I knew directly. Then from there I looked at follower lists of people who were in PR and marketing like me, to find like-minded people to network with. At one point - somewhere around 300-700 followers - it hit a kind of critical mass, and I didn't need to actively seek out followers anymore. The network grew by itself from there. It took about two years to get to where I am now, investing about an hour a day twittering."
My Experiment
I decided to jump in and see what it might be like in the deeper part of the river - sink or swim. Well, the current is pretty strong out there. However, Twitter usage manages its own learning curve by matching the numbers of followers and followees you have. A newbie, like me, would normally have only a few dozen follows, generating a post every few minutes. But a heavy twitter user, with 10,000 follows and followers, might be processing something like a post per second. It's a bewildering rate of information; most twitter users don't even use the concept of backlog, like in email.
Following some trusted tweet advisors, I installed Tweetdeck - sort of a Bloomberg for trading tweets. With this power tool and two large monitors, I was able to follow and keep up with a half dozen simultaneous conversations... all while monitoring email, Facebook and trying to get work done on the side. The effect is quite mesmerizing and I fell into a peak experience of social networking.
A few empirical observations about swimming in the deep end:
First, it's genuinely an addictive process. I used to design videogames, so I'm pretty good at tuning gameplay "action"... Twitter is definitely designed to encourage addictive usage. When I designed games, we would measure eyeblink rates to see if the player was entering a state of "flow" during gameplay. If the blink rate dropped precipitously after a few minutes of play, the game would most likely be a hit. And if you test a heavy twitter user in the same way, I'll bet that a similar thing is happening - a drop in the blink rate, some pupil dilation, and a surge in neuro-adrenaline.Second, Twitter differs from regular chatrooms and instant messaging because it removes the idea of boundaries. In a chatroom, you can see that you're in a room titled "Golf in the Kingdom" and there are 25 people. So you can get a sense of the crowd and subject matter. In Twitter, no such virtual boundaries exist... you're simply talking into the stream, and anyone at all might talk back. The more followers you have, the greater the likelihood that somebody's listening, but it's much more like CB radio than a cocktail party. You simply don't know who's listening or might reply... and there are absolutely no moderators out there.
Third, on the Internet, you run into all sorts of interesting people. But on Twitter, you do it so much faster. Once I installed Tweetdeck, I only spent four hours twittering in high speed, but managed to interact with perhaps ten times the normal number of people I'd expect to run into via chatrooms. The innovation guru John Kao once told me that serendipity is what makes innovation go faster... and often wished for a serendipity pedal that he could step on to increase random connections at companies. Twitter is serendipity on steroids.
I started my experiment tuning into the #haiku channel. @twitterhaiku wrote:
twitter followers...
from all over the planet...
how cool! hello, all!
Another entry, a bit more prosaic but reminiscent of the typical tweet, by @keithvassallo:
went to the movies...
saw monsters vs aliens...
nacho cheese was cold
I contributed one:
I sit and twitter
talking to everybody
and nobody too
This is cool. Kind of fun. Then I watched what was happening in #innovation. (Not much.) And then I chitchatted with people at random, as they flowed by. Eventually, I ran into a very intellectually stimulating woman named Alexa, and chatted with her while allowing myself to feel a little smitten for a bit. Yeah, this is definitely entertaining.
Then I ran into a glitch. As a newbie, I had mixed up reply with direct reply. It's a twitter faux pas equivalent to leaving the microphone on after a speech. A couple of kind souls explained what I was doing wrong and after clarifying the UI, I was able to turn off the mic. However, one power user - whose online personal is somewhat reminiscent of Meryl Streep's character in the film Doubt - decided to raise a virtual pitchfork and literally banish me from twitterland (known as a "suspension"). She was relentless, ignoring every apology and gesture of peace, and even stalked me on the web for a bit... a bit like someone who missed taking her meds.
For me, it was kind of exciting, "Wow, my first hatetweet! I'm finally a celebrity!"
But all joking aside, there are some power users out there who are deadly serious about their little corner of the twitterverse, and emotional flareups can happen with just as much intensity as email flaming. This brings me to the primary thesis of this article, that twitter is significant because it amplifies whatever effect computer interactivity has on people... Twitter is the first tweetch game of social networking.
The Neurophysiology of Twitter
In fact, there's a neuroscientist saying that there is a neurophysiological basis for such concerns. The Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, recently testified to members of the British government that social network sites risk "infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity". (Ref: The Guardian)
Greenfield told the House of Lords that social network sites are putting attention spans in jeopardy, warning: "If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction... such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder. It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in [such] technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder."
More importantly, Lady Greenfield also warned there is a risk of loss of empathy, which I believe is due to the fact that in cyber life, you can't see the subtle emotional cues on the faces of your victims as you send off that deliciously sarcastic email or get someone suspended for the hell of it. In linguistic theory, there are these rich facial and auditory gestures called phatics. It's the nod of the head or "uh huh" that tells the speaker that you're getting the message, it's clear-to-send, so keep it coming.
With face to face communications, the speaker is able to rely on the expression of the slightest note of distress on the listener's face, or even the silence on the phone, to realize that something he or she just said upset the listener. You know that silence. It's when your heart starts palpitating and you whine into your Bluetooth headset, "Honey? Honey? Are you there? Are you mad at me?"
That dance of rich metalinguistic feedback allows complex emotional communication to flow optimally, and without it, we end up with a worst case senario for humanity that Lady Greenfield envisions. The real world of touch and phatics and eye gazing provides emotional richness that simply does not exist in the cyberworld.
Now ask yourself, in order to see where Lady Greenfield is coming from, how much more emotionally limited can you be, than in a cyberverse limited to 140 characters?
Personally, I think that Lady Greenfield is overstating the risk. I think that the situation is similar to the development of freeways. Imagine transporting someone from the 1900s, and sticking them behind the wheel of a car today, speeding down the freeway... Obviously, it would be a terrifying experience for our time traveler. Now, ask yourself, could someone in the 19th century even imagine a world where millions of teenagers happily drive down such freeways while applying lipstick?
The human brain is an amazingly adaptive system, and will surely be able to accommodate virtually any acceleration of information and scope of multi-tasking over time. In twenty years, we humans will adapt to handle what now looks like an indigestible volume of information without even breaking a sweat... you can bet on that, for sure.
The Twitter Singularity?
Perhaps Twitter is even part of our evolutionary process, like that initial adaptation we now call neuro-plasticity during that first evolutionary venture, during that first mutation of brain cells? For those who don't feel like looking it up on wikipedia, neuro-plasticity relates to how the brain learns, by adding or removing connections, or adding cells. Researchers have discovered that norepinephrine, a neuro-adrenaline dubbed "the stress hormone", increases brain plasticity. But that's kind of obvious... when you're life's threatened, of course your brain is going to want to remember everything that's just about to happen.
Perhaps our brains, in a similar way, require stress and pressure to expand its capacities, and so we are now being pushed by new applications like Twitter to increase our base processing speeds – enabling a global network of brains that advance in lock step with the increasing speed of computer processors and search engines? Like the boundary-less twitterverse, where exactly is the boundary between our brains and the Internet?
Wow, big questions, huh? As for me, I'm leaning toward quitting the twitting. R.D. Laing once said, "Mystics and schizophrenics find themselves in the same ocean, but the mystics swim whereas the schizophrenics drown." The same could be said for the Internet and this river of human awareness. Twitter really is a significant time sink, and honestly, I'm more Zen than zap these days. I prefer to be the mystic reflecting quietly on my life and coming up with "My 25 List" on Facebook, than multitasking myself into a schizophrenic, shouting to everybody and nobody at the same time, listening to voices in the aether.
Thanks for reading!
Here's a link to Part III of this article where I share the results of our survey on Twitter usage, and providing concluding thoughts.
I promised a number of Twitter users who befriended me that I'd share the findings of the survey I launched about twitter usage. And so, I thought I'd wrap up this three part article on the Psychology of Twitter by discussing the results of the survey and sharing a few final observations about this new modality for compressed communication.Here is the my first article on the social phenomenon of Twitter and here is the followup article that dealt with the neurophysiological aspect of twittering.
So, let's talk about the survey. We received 63 responses, with people contributing major essays about twitter usage. So it's more of an in-depth ethnographic study than a longitudinal study. Of these users, 83% identified themselves as moderate to heavy users of Twitter. One user said, "I spurt, so I go from heavy to moderate usage - sometimes my life is more interesting than others :D" The average respondent has about 1000 followers, and has tweeted about 1500 times. The most popular tweeter had 17,000 followers.
Since I brought up the idea of a Maslovian hierarchy around Twitter, I thought I'd ask where on the pyramid our users were playing. The primary impacts were entertainment & creativity (in the high 70s), followed by "gaining a sense of belonging", self-actualization and livelihood (I expect this means all the savvy twitter marketers out there). Interestingly, finding love ranked VERY low. Some examples include, "My best friends are on twitter. Every time I need advice, help, suggestions or to inform them what Im gonna do, I do it that way." An artist/designer shares, "When I needed positive feedback on one of my new designs (I was at the point that I was about to give up), I asked the opinion of my followers, and I was met with immense positive reactions. The design was a success!" This shows that the difficult path of the artist can be supported by community.
In terms of self esteem, one user shared, "When I discovered that I was a total stranger's 'first follow', it totally boosted my self esteem!" She continues to share, rather poignantly, "I do sometimes use Twitter as emotional anesthesia: When my life as a stay at home mom to 6 children under 10 has its truly absurd moments, it can help to tweet a general cry of despair. It helps me to step back, and not take everything so seriously." Another shares, "When people retweet my blog posts or put me on a #followfriday, I feel very validated." It's amazing how people interpret the number of followers as an indication of social status, sometimes, as a validation of yourself in life.
In terms of assuaging despair, one user shared something quite interesting, "When my grandmother died, my friends sent supportive tweets to me. It was easier - emotionally - reading their messages, than it would have been receiving phone calls from them." That's something I never considered... that certain forms of communication are emotionally less trying than others.
For me, the most interesting responses were, "Twitter gives me a vague sense of myself as an entity who's left a trail in time and space", and "I look at Twitter as a casual diary or log or journal, providing a narrative for my life." There's definitely some existential angst being relieved by twittering, as it provides a way to validate yourself and type into the ether, "I am! I exist! I like yogurt!"
So that brings us to it. I asked people to share their deepest philosophical insights about Twitter, and they came through. My fave was "Twitter is so revealing. It's addictive, frivolous and exposes our depth (or lack of it) in the space of 140*infinity characters." Very Zen. Another advises, "Twitter is like an enormous cocktail party. Just don't barge in and start talking about yourself!" Another: "Jung was right about the collective consciousness! Perhaps not in the ways he'd dreamt, though." One user shared a particularly pithy review, "Twitter is simply a communication tool that greatly decreases the friction that time, place and meeting contributes to communication. Its primary contribution to social change is the unpredictable transmission patterns and velocities of ideas, moods and memes through the social network."
Here's another brilliant observation: "I have two philosophical observations... First, Twitter serves a vital individualistic function of announcing an open communication channel. The act of twittering, regardless of content, communicates that this person is ready to engage. The maintenance of open channels, or awareness of when they are closed, can be an overlooked aspect of communication. Second, with each tweet by each new user, we are learning to become a more transparent culture. I used to maintain separate identities in separate circles, but my stress levels went way down when I just started representing myself as a single identity and learning to share. Twitter is an excellent tool for this because of the opt-out, asymmetrical nature of the follow network."
A Myers-Briggs Certified Administrator shared, "I believe a lot of people in the Twitterverse are not behaving according to their type in the social media world. This forum allows those who do not normally openly network or get out in larger social audiences to feel completely comfortable in the privacy of their home or office by themselves to connect in ways they wouldn't in person. Many of us who DO enjoy the face to face networking and exposure are struggling with social media because we want the face to face connection as much as we want the networking." An astute observation.
Some negative comments were interesting. For example, "Bottom line... narcissistic all over the board! It's not so much that everyone has issues and comes to twitter. It's a very strange phenomenon that is occurring in this arena." Or this contribution: "Lifestreaming is not my thing; I don't care what every celeb and his dog had for breakfast. I enjoy the intellectual community of like-minded individuals who can add insight and material to my writing and teaching." Here's one more: "Twitter is yet another technology that has the potential to distract us and leave us less time for deep thinking and deep relationships. Google may not be 'making us stoopid' (to quote Nicholas Carr) but Twitter could."
But one user summed it up perfectly, "I think we are all trying to organize the new information age. We want to establish our online existence, and all these social networking sites are helping us do that. This will pass and one day become just part of life. We will all be given a place on the internet at birth, and all our virtual world will be connected at that place. We all have to express ourselves, in one way or another. Currently people do so mostly by pretending to be social marketing experts, or by showing their cleverness in finding cool websites made by others. But soon we will have art and music and other kind of expressions more easily coming through."
Finally, there was a cute comment in response to my proposition that each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, slowly struggling toward a great awakening. The respondent shared, "I haven't been using Twitter for very long, but am starting to feel like a well-connected neuron enjoying the ability to selectively develop synapses in a virtual global cortex." Funny!
I'll finish up this three part article by sharing that I believe that the sense of meaning and meaninglessness are actually internally generated mental states. In fact, the sense of meaning may be an evolutionary adaptation to increase our survival. The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) based his life's work on the belief that humans were able to find meaning even in the most horrific circumstances. Frankl was incarcerated in Auschwitz during World War II, where he observed that fellow inmates with a developed sense of spiritual meaning were far more likely to survive. His work tells us that without this sense of meaning, our capacity to withstand profound trauma is significantly diminished.
So if someone tweets, "I'm at Trader Joe's and remembering that I LOVE greek yogurt", it could seem pretty banal to most, or it could appear as a beautiful haiku or an amazing koan to others.
Try this experiment with me... let's tweak our mindstate around internet interactivity and the generation of the sense of meaning... just keep reading and open yourself to the possibility of changing your mindstate at will, as we enter a guided visualization...
When I see a singing bird, I can feel the beauty of life. Now see that twitter tweets are simply the songs of this odd and beautiful species called homo sapien. Now imagine the millions of twitter users, each in their own beautiful and tragic and tearful and happy road of "pain and then no pain". Let this feeling of beauty multiply, like maybe after years of traveling - you arrive at a place in time and space, so you can experience an entire rainforest of rare birds in song.
In such a state of techno-satori, all we can see is beauty, so every tweet is beautiful. Even the poor spammers trying to put food on the table - we feel their desperation during this recession, and our response is compassion. And now, it all begins to hold an increasing level of meaning. Or rather, we are now creating the hormones that generate a sense of meaning, and inject this sense of meaning into every tweet, and we feel greater and greater respect for every tweeting bird in the forest of humanity. With every tweet you read, you allow yourself to feel the complete totality of humanity within that person behind the tweet. Their pains, their joys. Open yourself to respecting and loving each and every profile picture in Twitter you see. Be the Dalai Lama. Let agape or bliss or wisdom overwhelm you and flow that divine love and respect to every being on your Tweetdeck screen, to every being using Twitter, to every being on the Internet, to every being in the world.
At this point, something funny happens... this sense of meaning turns around, and finally, I am able to see the meaning and beauty in what I am writing right now, right here, with these words - as I finally see that I am not an observer, but a participant in this immense beauty that is life. Now let that sense of meaning turn around again, and see your own meaning as you participate in the amazing twittering dance of life by ten billon neurons in your brain, by ten billion people on this planet, by ten billion planets with sentient life in our universe, by ten billion universes that occur over and over as the universe implodes and big bangs every 100 billion years or so.
It's all so incredibly beautiful! You are beautiful! Tweet away.
Thanks for reading this series of articles about Twitter! Next week, I'll return to discussing the psychology of innovation...
And I apologize that I wasn't able to provide @eddresses for the quotes, due to the limitations of my survey software. So if you'd like to take credit for your quote, just add a comment and supply your twitter address for people to follow! And thanks for participating!
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