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tweets

Google and Facebook, Therapists and Clients

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 4/29/2023

Google and Facebook, Therapists and Clients With more and more therapists embracing social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the question arises — where do you draw the line in terms of boundaries with your patients? Where does a patient’s and therapist’s privacy end or begin on such sites? How do patients and therapists navigate this brave new world of connectedness and “friending”?

Dana Scarton over at The Washington Post has the insightful article addressing this issue by talking to a number of therapists across the country. These therapists have had to deal with their own challenges with social networking sites and “researching” people online once it was brought into psychotherapy by a client or a client’s actions.

Professional associations haven’t addressed this kind of technology in their ethical guidelines, but common sense rules the day. As I just gave a presentation to therapists on this very topic, here’s the upshot of what I had to say about this from a professional’s point of view …

4/29/2023 43 comments

Twitter is the New Blogging, With a Twist

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 11/18/2022

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

It’s always interesting to me to see technology data trends repeat themselves, even when the technologies themselves are seemingly completely different and designed for different purposes.

Case in point: blogging versus Twitter. Although Twitter is often referred to as a micro-blogging service, some have also suggested it is better compared to a social network, like Facebook. But the data clearly show how Twitter is simply another form of blogging, on a much smaller scale.

Last week, The New York Times’ Douglas Quenqua wrote a story examining all of the orphaned and abandoned blogs on the Internet:

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

The New York Times story focuses on the disappointment and problems with blogging, ranging from too much unwanted publicity (what does one expect when one starts publishing one’s life online?), to not making the expected thousands of dollars from their blogs (really? people expect to get rich quickly online still??).

How does this compare to Twitter usage? Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski released some Twitter analysis early last week that helps provide an answer:

A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets.[…]

This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Yes, that’s right — most people tweet once and that’s it. 75 percent tweet 4 times (usually all at one sitting) and that’s it. Which is far more similar to blogging data patterns than it is to social networking data patterns.

Slate’s John Swansburg and Jeremy Singer-Vine also had an interesting piece yesterday about these one-tweet wonders — Orphaned Tweets. It’s an amusing look at those single tweets that people post on Twitter, never to return. Not unlike those first blog entries that so many millions have published, never to return.

All of this suggests that despite the increased usage of Twitter, we’re seeing what we’ve always seen in data trends for virtually all new Internet services that people aren’t quite sure how to use — people give it a whirl, and most decide it’s not for them and never return. However, unlike blogging, Twitter’s personal value to individuals is very much likely tied into their own extended social network (I say “extended” since the more popular you become on Twitter, the less likely you actually know all of the people you follow).

Perhaps the data also show that while people are willing to try new technologies, if the value proposition isn’t immediately evident and rewarding, most won’t stay with it to find one. People’s attention span on the Internet is so incredibly short and divided, something that doesn’t immediately add value to our lives may be difficult for most of us to justify in our already overwhelming schedules.

Read the full New York Times article: When the Thrill of Blogging Is Gone …

11/18/2022 8 comments

The Psychology of Twitter

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 9/13/2022

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Twitter is a social networking application that does only one thing — allows the mutual sharing of 140 character communications (called “tweets”). Why the 140 character limit? So you can send text updates from your cell phone as well as the net.

If you haven’t used or even heard of Twitter, don’t worry, you’re not alone. As of now, only 11 percent of American Internet users have used something like Twitter (that number also includes people who simply update their status in Facebook, so we don’t know the true, lower number of Twitter-only users) (Lenhart & Fox, 2009). Twitter is a service used more widely the younger you are (up to 20 percent of those under 34 have used it or a status update service) (Lenhart & Fox, 2009).

The best way to imagine Twitter is as a 24/7 online conversation that never ends, even when you’re away from the computer. Since tweets are so short, they better take on more of an immersive, real-time feel of a talking conversation than, say, an email. Think instant messaging, except instead of talking to a single person, you’re talking to the world (and the world talks back!).

We’ve been down this road before. Despite the relative ease of creating a web page and putting it somewhere online in 1996 (GeoCities was an online community that hosted such pages and had millions of users at one point), online conversation really began on the web with the advent of blogs. It opened up web-based, two-way conversation, allowing feedback on what one wrote online:

Static Web page	Blogs
One to many Limited conversation	One to many Open public conversation (public feedback loop)
IM/Chat rooms	Twitter
One to one/many Difficult to access (especially on cell phones)	One to one/many Easy to access Far more public (public feedback loop)

Twitter is doing the same thing for online chat. Long available in other forms, such as IRC, IM or the thousands of individual chat rooms scattered around the net, chat is the informal streaming conversation done in real-time. The important differences that Twitter brings to the party is that its chat room is readily accessible to anyone, the conversation is automatically stored forever, it’s all readily searchable, and most importantly, it can act as a shared communications medium (like a regular chat room) or a private one (like IM). Twitter also supports applications that make twittering easy from anywhere. And just like blogging before it, one of Twitter’s primary uses seems to be to share URLs of other interesting, helpful or entertaining resources online (which depends entirely on whom you choose to “follow,” e.g. — add as a “friend”).

The Pros and Cons of Twitter

Because of this, Twitter has some unique pros and cons.

On the pros side, Twitter is yet another way to communicate online. I’m not certain anyone thought we needed this (“Oh great, one more thing I need to keep updated!”), but its popularity speaks to an unfilled communications void. The fact that it allows you to also update your status on other social networks means it can act as a central “status updating” service.

But more importantly, Twitter acts as a new public, global conversation medium. Like blogging before it, it has the potential to move us away from the “1.0” tools (like IM and chat rooms) to bring conversational chat out of the dark back rooms and into the public light.

This is a key point, because humans are inherently social creatures who engage primarily in conversational talking. Most of us aren’t authors and don’t write books, articles, or even blogs. We simply know how to talk, and Twitter is the first text service to adequately mimic this behavior in an online medium.

On the cons side, Twitter celebrates public conversation. This means that the private messaging tools are limited and not the default. Once you tweet something, it’s out there in the world forever (and stored to be searchable in the future on Twitter’s servers). The good news is that unlike Facebook, when you delete your Twitter account, your Twitter history is also gone.

Twitter can also bring about a feeling that you’re “missing something” when you’re not online and see your Twitter feed. Normal human conversations have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Twitter has none of these things — it’s continuous and nonstop, even when you’re gone. This can impart a sense of needing to “always be there” to see what’s going on. This isn’t necessarily a new feeling for some people, but the constant conversational updating on Twitter brings it to a new level.

This behavior can be unlearned, however, as it’s simply a way we’ve been taught to have a conversation with others when those conversations nearly always occurred face-to-face. Online, with no such limits as needing to be there at exactly the same time as another person, many of us will have to learn that it’s okay to step away from the conversation and come back to it at another time. It also means, however, that others need not to expect all replies in Twitter to be instantaneous. Just like email, some people will have it on all the time, and others will only check it once a day.

Which brings us to one of the biggest downsides of Twitter, and that’s knowing what you missed — you simply don’t know. Unless you have the time to go back and review everything “said” while you were away from the computer (bad you, trying to sleep!), you’re going to miss stuff. And although it’s unlikely to be important stuff (you can easily review direct and private messages sent only to you), you just don’t know.

This not knowing if you’ve missed anything “important” in the Twitterverse is a characteristic of the increase in information overload many people are beginning to experience. Between blogs, RSS feeds, news headlines, emails, Facebook status updates, and now Twitter, many people are starting to look like zombies trying to process all the information being pushed to them. Good information helps us (lead more productive lives, stay informed, etc.), while bad information results in a waste of our time and cognitive resources. But tools like Twitter don’t differentiate, all the while pushing dozens (or hundreds!) of updates to our eyes everyday.

And that’s supposedly a good thing, according to some arguments made by many people who are mesmerized by Twitter. There are “jewels” in there somewhere, sometimes, that make all the endless drivel acceptable. I suppose so, but it can very much be like waiting for a thoughtful needle to poke you from the haystack of the mundane.

Which is all the more ironic given that computers are ideal tools for helping us sift through vast amounts of data and making sense of the data (trends, significance, etc.). But Twitter turns that idea on its head and instead sends us the unfiltered stream of consciousness from millions of people. While certainly potentially interesting and even fascinating at times, most people aren’t simply up to that kind of data dump on top of their existing daily routines (and existing, limited cognitive resources).

Twitter is helpful for those who find it so, but it’s not for everyone (just like blogs, Facebook, and even an iPhone). Whether it holds value for you and improves your everyday life and information flow is something you’ll only find out if you try it yourself.

Ready for more? Read the Psychology of Twitter, Part 2

Reference:

Lenhart, A. & Fox., S. (2009). Twitter and status updating. Pew Internet & American Life Project.

9/13/2022 34 comments