Twitip

by Ilaria Papini (follow her at @swimturtle) from turtle^haus.

Like many of Darren’s readers, I too hope to turn my blogging ventures into a real live internet business that allows me to work from home in my pajamas (I’m not suggesting that Darren works in his pajamas!). For this reason, all the interesting stories about Twitter’s uses as a marketing tool are fascinating and definitely grab and hold my attention. But in my opinion, as far as Twitter is concerned, we have only just barely begun to scratch the surface of its potential. I believe there are a myriad uses to which we could put Twitter than haven’t even occurred to us yet. In this post I will illustrate one “alternative” use to which I have put it, with very exciting results.

I run a blog called turtle^haus, the goal of which is to help people reconnect with stories: their own, those of other people, fictional stories, you name it. I am convinced that stories are the foundation of civilization and that reconnecting with them at a visceral level can help make our lives more harmonious as individuals, and bring more emotional health to our society as a whole.

For the time being I have started two threads in turtle^haus: one revolves around literature, literary stories, author interviews, book reviews, and so on; the other revolves around telling our life stories through the physical spaces we inhabit. I am interested in helping people adapt their living and work spaces to the rhythms of their lives so as to make their space a seamless extension of their physical selves, and fit them with the comfort of a glove over a hand.

And this is where Twitter comes in. If you have ever attended a creative writing workshop, or taken a writing course in school or college, you will have heard the phrase “show, don’t tell.” What teachers mean when they say this is that it is so much more effective at “pulling you into the story” to read something like, “Joey screwed up his fist, wrenched his arm back, and punched Simon in the gut,” than something like, “Joey was so mad he wanted to punch Simon, so he thought about it, full of anger, and then he said, “Simon, if you don’t cut that out, I’ll punch you…” You get the picture. The 140-character limit on Twitter eliminates all the “telling” and leaves only the “showing.” If you are relaying an emotional experience, you get right to the point and say what you feel. If you are relaying a fact, you just come out and say it, plain and simple.

So I decided to conduct what I have called a “social experiment” that combines Twitter with interior decorating. If you are wondering who gave me any authority in this made-up field, I will just say that I am a trained architect and also a librarian and information scientist. I am obsessed with the use of space, de-cluttering, beauty, functionality and also with Web 2.0, the internet, social media and virtual communities. So it made perfect sense, in my world, to bring these two spheres together.

I was inspired to try this experiment by a series of articles on Twitter that I read in the New York Times and other papers. All these articles had in common the fact that they had been written by skeptics, people who had held off opening a Twitter account for the longest time, thinking, “I need one more social network like I need a hole in the head,” or “What do I care that you’re getting ready for bed, or watching the latest episode of ‘Lost’?” Realizing that they couldn’t go on forever criticizing Twitter without ever having tried it, they reluctantly opened accounts, and then strange things started happening. They became unexpectedly mesmerized by the rhythms and patterns they began to discern in the lives of the people they were following. The sandwiches, when repeated every day at a certain hour, complete with recipes, became something to look forward to. Reading the tweets on the ritual of getting ready for bed or awakening in the morning made them feel close to their Twitter friends, sometimes closer than to their “real” friends.

When I talk to people about how they would like to arrange the furniture in their house, or how they would like to use a certain room, I notice that they are oddly out of touch not only with the rhythms of the lives of others, but even their own. People think they know what they do all day, how they live, and what they would like to change, but the truth is that they don’t. Or at the very least there are great gaps in their knowledge.

So I recruited two friends who had just bought an apartment and who had a slightly unusual living arrangement, and asked them if they would like to participate in this Twitter-based social experiment as an aid in figuring out how to configure their new space. These two women are information professionals, neither of them had a Twitter account, but they were intrigued and they readily agreed. This is how the experiment worked:

• They would open Twitter accounts, follow each other and I would follow the two of them
• For two weeks they would tweet once every hour or every time they changed their activity, whichever came first
• The only “rule” in the tweets was that they were to pay attention, as they tweeted, to where they were when they were doing whatever it was they were doing, and how they experienced the space they were in – if they were comfortable, sitting, standing, the conditions of the light, temperature, colors, etc.

After one week, I printed out their tweets and analyzed them, then I wrote a post on my blog with my analysis and my tentative conclusions and recommendations. During the second week something very interesting happened. I didn’t learn a lot more about their routines and general habits, but the tone of their tweets changed. They relaxed into the medium, they got into the rhythm of it. I don’t know how else to say it, but their tweets began to… breathe. The results of this second week were very interesting because I was able to make an analysis based more on mood, on how their space affected their emotional state, how they liked the color of the walls, the furniture, the light, and so on.

What never ceases to amaze me with Twitter is just how much of people’s personalities comes through in these tiny text-bites. If you think that you can’t really say anything in 140 characters, think again. If you get into a rhythm it becomes like the tide, ebbing and flowing to the music of your life.

If you are curious about this experiment, please visit my blog and read the whole story in all the gory details. There is a series of articles on the Series page all about this. It starts with the house tour of the empty apartment, with photos taken the day after the closing. Then there are the three posts on the Twitter experiment, and this coming Saturday I will be visiting the apartment again and taking post-experiment photos. I am thrilled with the results of this experience and I can’t wait to do it again with someone else. The potential is endless!