All in: An inquiry into being a technically social consultant, by Erica Packington

8/3/2019 All in: An inquiry into being a technically social consultant, by Erica Packington

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All In?

An inquiry into being a technically social consultant

Erica Packington/@Erica_Jane_MP

AMOC 11


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Thanks to

Mum, Dad, Pat for various levels of conversation, cups of tea, chivvying and practical support during

my AMOC experience.

Mark for helping me see that this re-write wasnt a huge job when I needed it not to be.

Jane L for gently, consistently challenging my belief that writing about myself is self-indulgent and

pushing me to go a bit deeper.

Maia. I imagine this will all seem so quaint when you read it via embedded neural robot hologram.

Once, social technologies were new and some of us got quite excited about it all

Twitter. My research respondents, the helpers/ volunteers Ive not met f2f yet (David H, @al_vimh),

everyone who pitched in with contribution, conversation, distractions. #SrslyYouGuysRock

My interviewees Ash, Aden, Greg and Jenni. Thanks for letting me pester you, then steal your words.

My client interviewees Sarah and Lizzie. Thank you.

Em for the best quotes Ta DA!

Hugh P for sticking with me through broken bones, good-ish intentions and terrible time-

management. Twice.

Front cover image

Main network image is Tree of routing paths through a portion of the Internet as visualized by

the Opte Project.

Friends and followers grid from twilk.com

All In: An inquiry into being a technically social consultant by Erica Packington is

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


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A pre-introduction to the introduction.

What you are reading is a much revisited piece of work, one that has taken me (what feels like)

forever to complete. This iteration is a rewrite, focused on bringing my voice to the fore and

exploring in greater depth my own motivations, thinking and experience of the subject matter

which is, ostensibly, myself, my immersion in social technologies and how that shows up in my

consulting. Indeed, thats the flow you can expect as you read.

I have found the experience of writing incredibly challenging. I have written 22,000 words theyre

still to come for you, but have been living with me for a fair few months mostly on my own. And

yet, within these words I talk about how deeply I value sociality. What you cant see, what cant be

contained in this page, are the parallel accompanying words, the conversations Ive had as Ive

narrated my experience over Twitter. In reviewing both, I find myself frustrated with this form, for

being an artefact, not a flow; a product not a process.

If you are reading this on an internet connected device, Ive embedded links in the text to take you

to interesting places. While I hope the document makes sense as a static artefact, I believe the work

as a whole has greater richness in a form that allows for jumping out of here and visiting the places

Ive signposted for you theyll be hyperlinks, in blue and underlined. If the words before you are

static, perhaps you might revisit them online sometime Ive put the URLs in the footnotes.

But first, to what is here. Who am I? What am I doing? Why?

Who am I, what am I doing?I am Erica Jane Mitchell-Packington. I am Erica Packington. I am She-RARR. I am an AMOC student

writing up a dissertation. I am @Erica_Jane_MP

Im a social tech geek. IMO the most interesting thing about social technologies is peoples

behaviours not bytes

Im fascinated how the ability for people to exchange information in new ways is bringing about

individual, organisational & societal change

I see Twitter as an extremely social technology that can offer an edge case for the examination of

organisational approaches to sociality

On and offline, my purpose and interest is in how to help create space for humanness and

authenticity and feelings in organisational life

This dissertation explores online sociality from the perspective of a user, researcher, thinker &

consultant

To guide you in what to expect, I will now allow myself more than 140 characters.

Ill start with an outline of the technical and social context as I see it; an exploration of why social

technologies appeal to me as an All In individual, on intellectual, emotional and professional levels.

Ill then bring you into a piece of research I conducted over Twitter and used to examine some of my

emerging thoughts about sociality online. And after that, well look at how this is showing up in my

consulting practice. But first: I think the world is changing.


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Outlining the technical and social context (as I see it)Social technologies are opening up myriad opportunities for individuals and groups to connect as

never before. Many people are extending the individuals, groups and communities they interact

with for work and play beyond traditional social networks (typically geographically bound and face-

to-face) to take elements of their relationships online. Indeed, many people are establishing, tending

to and participating in relationships with people they may never meet face-to-face. These

relationships may be formed on a basis of belief, identity, shared experience, otherpolitical/social/civic connection, sexuality, task, practice, profession, love of videos of kittens doing

funny things, bad puns or word games. These relationships are also (un)commonly productive.

Extraordinary things are happening as people organise, create, share and socialise online.

This shift, and the underpinning technologies and practices it engenders, mean finding a name for

what it is, is really complicated.

Our difficulty in naming a trait that defines the media we are scrutinising (interactive, digital,

virtual, online, social, networked, convergent etc) stems from the fact that we are examining a

constellation of media changes, in a move toward more digital, networked and interactive forms,

which together define the horizon of the new

Ito et al(2010, p10)

I intend to use the term social technologies for this piece, whilst recognising that this is both

partial and unsatisfactory. I mean it to encompass the range of tools and practices as outlined

above1.

Prior to technologies that were explicitly social in their operations and function, examinations of

technology through a sociological lens tended to look at how social factors influenced the design,

manufacture and operations of a technology, and how the emerging technology had social impacts.

Importantly, technology was recognised as broader than just tool or thing.

Technology is a slippery term, and concepts such as technological change and technological

development often carry a heavy interpretive load.Three layers of meaning of the wordtechnology can be distinguishedFirst there is the level of physical objects or artefacts Second,

technology might refer to activities or processes. Third [it] can refer to what people know as well as

what they do.

Bijker, Hughes and Pinch (1989, p3)

These definitions are helpful they illuminate that technology isnt just artefact, but also refers to

activity, processes, practice, know-how. The significant shift in the current period is that social

technologies are particularly networked media, or publishing technologies.

The innovation in the realm ofphysical object or artefactis one of networked devices that enable

individuals to connect to a web of information not just as consumers, but as creators. The artefacts

enable us to answer back within the media environment phones connected to the web, internetconnected computers, tablet devices. The practice, processes and know-how required to do so,

while not without barriers to entry, are orders of magnitude more accessible than previous

opportunities to create and distribute media at a mass scale.

1Ill also be using the word organisations a lot. Its both a reification of an on-going process of social relating

and useful shorthand.


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Everyone with access to a computer and an internet connection now has the opportunity to be a

publisher. This is called symmetrical participation and is qualitatively different to the dynamics of

broadcast:

symmetrical participation means once people have the capacity to receive information, they have

the capacity to send it as well

Shirky (2008, p107)

Information as communication and commodityPrior to the rise of social technologies, organisations and institutions had been accustomed to using

broadcast methods of communication. Broadcast requires control over the message content, some

measure of control over the means of delivery, and has inherently limited opportunity for response

within the message delivery form. It is one-to-many.

Individuals had been used to negotiating private media, like the telephone, which was two-way, but

limited in reach in terms of group size it was possible to engage.

The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media

(like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scalefrom private to public.

Shirky (2010, p55)

The shift to symmetrical participation has called into question the role of those who traditionally

generated and distributed published content at scale. Tim OReilly refers to the transfer of

capabilities from professionals to members of the general public as a shift in the architecture of

participation(OReilly in Shirky, 2008 p17)2. The current technological reality is that it is incredibly

easy to create and share brand new content challenging institutions set up to gather, filter and

publish content like newspapers and broadcast media. It is incredibly easy to make and share

flawless copies of digital media (and everything traded using computer technology are digital

media). In addition, the act of distributing media is no longer tied to organisational complexity. This

challenges institutions and companies who built their business models on the assumption thatcopying and distributing media at scale was difficult such as film and music publishing companies

3.

But the act of publication is fundamentally one of sharing information at scale. And sharing

information effectively is one of the key activities that makes group co-ordination difficult.

Therefore, one of the most profound implications of the new media environment being a publishing

revolution as well as a one of distributed network connectivity, is that groups have the means and

mechanisms to organise differently to perform collective activity.

2For example, the profession of journalist was defined as someone who worked for a media outlet

(newspaper, television, radio) who wrote stories that were published/broadcast. However, this definition of

journalist is not internally and independently consistent it is tied to ownership of communications

machinery and an assumption based on a scarcity of access that no longer applies. Communications machinery

is no longer scarce, and anyone can now journal events in practice. This is more than just a linguistic hair-

splitting exercise we place significant social and political weight on the notion of a free press, for example.

However, if the nature of technology shifts and undermines the definition of a journalist, who is protected

under the laws we have created? Who is afforded the freedom to report and who is not? This is currently very

much being demonstrated by attempts to control information about the policing of the #Occupy movement


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Information sharing as part of organisingSocial technologies are socio-technical systems existing in the interplay between technologies, (near)

ubiquitous access to technologies and connection mechanisms, and social behaviours - particularly

sharing. The platforms enable and rely on social behaviours to operate. In turn, these social and

group social behaviours older perhaps than our humanness - are shaped by the context of the

technological mediation.

Humans are inherently social and thus new ways of expressing that sociality will impact on previous

organising forms and constraints. For example, Clay Shirky points out that

The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups

function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media

and religion.

Shirky (2008, p16)

In fact, Shirky hails ridiculously easy group formationas the defining transformational

characteristic of the internet. One of the most profound changes brought about by social

technologies is the demonstration of extraordinary organising thats happening in the absence of

formal organisations.

Organising without organisations.We use the word organisation to mean both the state of being organised and the groups doing the

organising....we use one word for both because, at a certain scale, we havent been able to get

organising without organisations. The former seems to imply the latter.

Shirky (2008 p29)

Shirky holds that social technology tools start to challenge the basis upon which organisations were

initially founded that of coping with the costs of managing the complexity of group action.

Our basic desires and talents for group efforts are stymied by the complexities of group action at

every turn. Coordination, organisation, even communication in groups is hard, and gets harder as thegroup grows. That difficulty means that whatever methods help coordinate group action will spread,

no matter how inefficient they are, so long as they are better than nothing.... for large scale activity,

the methods that have worked best have been... hierarchical organisation, managed in layers.

Shirky (2008 p45)

The network of relationships within an organisation is supported by a financial relationship between

company and employee, roles, tasks, cultural norms and values expressed through policies,

procedures, expected ways of behaving. The ties between members of the group (the organisation)

tend to be supported by these social bonds and strong.

Depending on the organisation form and function, those people traditionally conceived of as

outside the organisation - such as customers, suppliers, shareholders, communities tend to havelooser ties to one another. The opportunity costs of organising those outside an organisation were

traditionally higher than organising those inside. This is changing.

By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort

without requiring formal management (and its attendant overheads) these tools have radically

altered the old limits on the size, sophistication and scope of unsupervised effort

Shirky (2008, p21)


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The challenges posed by self-organising communities do not extend to every area of organisational

capability and reach. It is most evident where the costs of planning and coordination are greater

than the monetary value of the result. Because many communities come together for reasons other

than financial gain, the costs of participation are not interpreted in the same way as they would have

to be for an organisation, where time and effort costs directly translate into monetary costs.

We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now wehave Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.

Shirky (2008, p142)

So, the impact of new technological environments on a hierarchically structured organisation

(perhaps where people also hold a strong conceptual boundaries between inside and outside) may

occur on several fronts. Those accustomed to exercising a high degree of control over information

will not may have to re-conceptualise and change how they relate to mainstream and distributed

non-professional media. The conversations taking place between consumers, customers, service

users and publics are visible in a way that they never were before and thus how organisations relate

to their customers may need to change (CRM, sales process, customer care, reputation

management). In addition, how organisations receive information about their performance may

change offering potential for eavesdropping on natural interactions about them rather thanrelying on traditional market research techniques.

Ridiculously easy group formation means the opportunity costs for stakeholders to strengthen their

ties to one another and self-organise in relating with the organisation for collective action are now

close to nil, so how organisations think about political and community action may need to change.

And finally, competition may come from a form of organisation that doesnt look like anything that

has come before, such as collective, but not co-ordinated, action that may transform the entire

marketplace (peer-to-peer sharing of music and films), or coordinated action that explicitly organises

around the principles of unsupervised effort (such as Wikipedia or open source software

movement).

Why it matters to look at this, and to look at it nowIn When Old Technologies Were New Carole Marvin offers that:

the introduction of new media is a special historical occasion where patterns anchored in older

media that have provided the stable currency of social exchange are re-examined, challenged, and

defended

Marvin (1998, p43)

Marvin holds that media (the form of technological innovation that forms the basis for social media)

have "no natural edges", and their functions within society are not determined by inherent technical

issues, but instead are dependent on a range of cultural, social, economic and political factors. She

defines media as

"constructed complexes of habits, beliefs, and procedures embedded in elaborate cultural codes of

communication"

Marvin (1998, p96)

These elaborate codes are not just hard-coded into the build and operation of the platforms within

which the communication occurs. Social technologies arent social unless people use them. And as

people use them, the operation and function of the technology changes, and this in turn influences

the iterative development of that technology.


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As stated previously, Marvin reminds us that the patterns of social exchange, historically rooted in

older media, are subject to re-examination, challenge and defence in the face of the new.

Sometimes this may requires a completely different way of assessing and determining value of that

which is thought of as pretty fundamental. In the introduction to this video4, Clay Shirky offers an

example that beautifully illustrates how groups choosing to operate together differently can offerfundamental challenges to view of the world built on other sets of assumptions. He tells a story

about a UNESCO visit to the ancient Ise Shinto shrine. The shrine is made of wood, and is periodically

torn down and rebuilt roughly every 20 years. The monks tending this shrine have been building

and rebuilding a shrine on the same site for 1300 years, and were attempting to get it recognised as

worthy of World Heritage status.

UNESCO refused to recognise the site - the materials were only 20 years old and didnt conform to

their definitions of ancient. Shirky calls this an act of assessing value on solidity of edifice, not

solidity of process . In order to recognise the shrine, UNESCO would have to completely rethink

their underpinning conceptualisations of what makes for constancy and enduring construction. What

has endured for 1300 years were the social bonds and behaviours of the monks to tend to a

structure on that site for that purpose, not the structure itself.

I believe social technologies are already requiring us to rethink and question some underpinning

criteria of what we choose to believe to be possible and meaningful. In particular, they can provide

strong challenge to what we may take to constitute meaningful relating between people. I believe

this is particularly acute when looking at whether relationships that are mediated online are real

an aspect I will return to in greater detail shortly.

The re-examination posited by Marvin doesnt actually happen at the point of innovation, or

breakthrough, but rather when the tool becomes more widely adopted. Shirky (2008, p105) again:

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

Jeff Jarvis, in Public Parts, also recognises the historical context for the disruptive influence of toolsand places the new publishing context in its historical place.

Our tools may have diminutive names Google, Blogger, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr but they play no

less havoc in the culture than the press, the portraits, the printed song, the explorers ship, the

suddenly round globe, and the new marketplaces did in their day

Jarvis (2011, p73)

So far, so interesting. But also, so what? Why am I, as Erica Packington, as @Erica_Jane_MP, as a

consultant, so attracted to this subject?

4And Id recommend watching the video, if you can. Its a very nice introduction to his ideas elaborating on a

big thing that has been done for love that of the development of a community built and supported

programming language called PERL. Its more interesting than it sounds, trust me. If you are reading a paper

version, heres the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xe1TZaElTAs


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Why does this appeal to me?Im personally interested in social technologies on several levels. I find them fascinating on an

intellectual level, and have really enjoyed investigating and re-engaging with sociological theory

through the lens of what online sociality looks and feels like. Shortly, I will be working with some

theories I have found helpful in supporting my inquiry.

Im also interested in how traditional power structures and ways of organising are being subvertedby people behaving differently at scale and how my engagement and type of political activity has

changed as a result, and how it influences how I think about my work as a consultant.

And, of course, Im professionally interested in how I can bring my understanding, practice and

passion for social technologies into my work as an organisation consultant, working with change. I

will devote the final section of this work to exploring this aspect of my interest.

First, I want to offer an example of how I am emotionally engaged in relationships that matter

hugely to me with family, friends, communities of interest through technologies.

Real (e)motion

I notice I have a strong emotional reaction to being told that relating virtually isnt real or issomehow invalid. I believe the particular characteristics of virtual relating, particularly text based

synchronous messaging (Instant Messaging, or IM), were beneficial in helping my father and I repair

a strained and damaged relationship.

My father and I had a dramatic argument when I was 13 years old, just before I moved to the UK

with my mother and younger brother, and he stayed in The Bahamas. My emotional reaction to the

argument coloured our relating for years, and we seemed to find it difficult to communicate

properly with one another through letters, phone calls or face-to-face. He wrote letters which I

responded to infrequently and then carried round in my bag until they were out of date and never

sent. We both dislike talking on the phone, and face-to-face I would find it incredibly difficult to talk

to him (and I think he to me, although of course, I cant speak for his experience). When I got my first

email address in 1994 at university and he got email at his work, we began to exchange emails.When instant messengering technologies arrived (around 1999/2000) we began to chat.

I think the particular characteristics of the communications mechanisms we chose enabled us to step

back a bit from the emotional noise that crowded into other means of relating. It was both

immediate and distanced. IM, in particular, gave us the chance to exchange short Hi, Im thinking

about you messages.

The sharing of day-to-day experiences can be understood as an example ofambient virtual co-

presence(Ito and Okabe 2005) or checking in a key social gesture that in many ways,

approximates the sharing of physical space (Horst, Herr-Stephenson, Robinson in Ito, M. 2010). In

my father and my case, I believe the ability to check in in a way that was low commitment; both

distanced and present; informal and immediate, and enabled us to build, over time, a powerfulmeans of communicating with one another.

I have had several IM conversations with my father on extraordinarily emotional issues, including the

breakup of my relationship with the father of my child, and of his relationship with an emotionally

difficult ex-partner, that I think we would have found very tough, if not impossible, face-to-face. I

have become more able to talk to him face-to-face as a result.


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So, I am aware that I am emotionally invested in the sense that virtual means of performing

relationships are valid. Indeed, if we take seriously the notion that relationships form the core of our

sociality, then the emotional power of text/word will be deeply rooted in our relationship to the

person or persons who we are exchanging them with. In her poem, Text, Carol Ann Duffy writes in an

almost claustrophobic manner about exchanging texts with a lover.

TextI tend the mobile now

like an injured bird

We text, text, text

our significant words.

I re-read your first,

your second, your third,

look for your small xx,

feeling absurd.

The codes we send

arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,

their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press

will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy (2005, p2)

I recognise the tension - feeling absurd, knowing that nothing my thumbs press will ever beheard and still, when it comes, the words are significantknowing that when they come, thexx

kisses will land.

I think Duffys poem beautifully illustrates the sense that the distance, technology or medium

somehow compromises the interaction, that its not quite real. On the one hand, it is real, in that it is

emotionally impactful and contributes to the historical and emotional bricolage of what that text

means in the context of the relationship. On the other, the interaction makes the writer feel

absurd. Why? I think the absurdity comes from a sudden, jarring reminder that the relationship

itself is being mediated through a technology. Later, I will examine how phenomenology and Gestalt

thinking can offer us a way to understand this jarring reminder.

But first, I want to bring in some voices of various sociological theorists I have found really

interesting to re-engage with over the course of my intellectual inquiry into social technologies.


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I am, essentially, a social constructionist

Social technologies as a way of re-engaging with theory

I would claim my theoretical underpinnings as solidly social constructionist. The core principles are

intellectually interesting to me I enjoy exploring theoretical explorations of how people in groups

are but the core notion of meaning as emerging in the spaces between complex group interplay

is one that just makes sense to me. I studied sociology and politics at university and was particularlytaken with social constructionist and post-modernist thinking. I felt it fit the way I saw the world.

However, they were a range of theories in amongst others and there didnt seem to be any way to

demonstrate how they might be more relevant to understanding the world than other explanations.

I believe, that social technologies offer unprecedented access to other peoples relating, so our

opportunity to see the process and practice of meaning-making between people who are not us is

greatly enhanced. In addition, we are challenged to confront how we self-present in this sphere.

Complexity, creativity and relating through languageSocial constructionists, by challenging us to open up our understanding of the world to the richness

of many voices and ways of seeing the world, are challenging us to accept and recognise complexity.

Our view of the world will always be partial, time-bound and constructed in a complex network of

relations. There exist an infinite number of interactions in past, present and future orientations, such

that no-one is able to step outside this interaction in order to see the whole picture of what we are

co-creating.

Healthy, creative, ordinary effective human interaction is...always complex, no matter what the

situation

Stacey (2005 pg 8)

A key social constructionist strand of thought, Complex Responsive Processes (CRP) as offered by

Ralph Stacey above, is brought to life for me by thinking about the scope and scale of the visible

construction that is the internet that humankind has collectively created (and is creating at an everincreasing pace). As a system, its difficult to define, used by up to 2 billion people on earth to date

and estimated to contain more than 250 million webpages5. No one is in control of the internet it is

a (partially) visible, highly complex series of interlinked networked systems. This, to me, is one of the

clearest demonstrations of complexity especially if one is challenged to think about how ones own

complex life experience is represented by, or contained by, ones experience online.

I fully believe that one can be real, authentic and present online that is, we can show up online.

However, the multiplicity of our many selves cannot be captured and represented fully, even for the

most dedicated and open user. For a start, the sensations of being bodily present with someone else

are not (yet?) represented or reproducible in an online environment. If even something as huge and

complex as the internet cant capture the complexity of ones own life, then it can serve as a

strong illustration of a perspective that reminds us to approach the wider world as a highly complexseries of interrelating systems lacking any overall control or oversight.

6

However well CRP serves me as a descriptive mechanism for understanding relating as complex, I

find I react to it as a deeply analytical and somewhat cold approach, more useful for describing the

world than operating within it.

5http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/s


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Stacey observes that

If we take seriously that a pattern of interaction...emerges in the context of local interactions then

there could be a change in the overall pattern only if the local interactions change.

Stacey (2002 p?)

I believe Stacey intends the above observation to serve as a descriptive, not aspirational, statement.

However, he firmly posits that patterns of relating are constantly being reinforced and reinvented by

our actions and meaning making. From a different tradition within social constructionism, Gergen

offers a more aspirational take on the same underlying theme.

As we describe, explain or otherwise represent, so we do fashion our future.

Gergen (1999 p?)

Emerging from a matrix of relational activity, socially enacted patterns are strongly reinforced

through group norms and values, with associated socially constructed sanctions for transgression.

These are patterns of relating, not absolutes. We create them anew every time we participate in

them. Participating differently brings about new patterns. What the perspective affords us is thepossibility to change the pattern of relating, in order to change the reality we experience.

I see this as a profoundly empowering perspective. It holds that, not only is change possible, but it

affords ownership of that change to groups of people, acting in relationship (if not necessarily

concert).

The nature of social technologies affords us unprecedented access to observe the patterns of

relating for groups and individuals who are not us. It can force us to examine our current meaning

making in the face of challenge from that of others, particularly when it comes to issues of control

and privilege.

Sexting / behind the bikesheds

There is much debate and discussion about teen use of social technologies, and how inappropriate

behaviours may be putting lives, psyches and future professional prospects at risk. The narrative

holds that the public demonstration of these teenage behaviours flirting, testing boundaries and

interacting like normal teens is qualitatively different to any teenage boundary testing that any

other generation got up to, behind the bikesheds, for example.

I happen to be quite pleased that my teenage rebellion, such as it was, wasnt recorded in text,

picture, video and potentially visible to my parents at the time, or even to my (now 20 years older)

self. However, I do believe that the current moral panic about teenage use of the internet (see This

Daily Mail article7

for a prime example) has, at its heart, a change in the type of visibility of

behaviour, not a qualitative shift in type of behaviour. That is, the means of performing these

perfectly normal teenage behaviours are now brought into a medium that happens to record them

and make them (potentially) visible to people they were never intended for. The form is bringing

into view what was always there but concealed behind social boundaries that would not previously

admit us and these boundaries were enforced by a form of identity performance that was more

solidly rooted in our physical selves. You would have noticed if your mum turned up behind the

7http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1162777/Generation-sexting-What-teenage-girls-really-internet-

chill-parent.html


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bikesheds and you would have adjusted your behaviour accordingly. If she is snooping on your

Facebook account, you might not know shes there8.

Relating online asks us to codify our own relating in the form of text, pictures and other digitally

created or represented forms and share them to participate in groups and communities. This means

we construct a series of linked data that, collectively, make our online identities. These data are

persistent, and therefore can be shared in new ways. New conceptualisations of privacy areemerging that take the inherent persistence and sharing capacity of data into account. As we,

collectively, work out what the new norms are around this (bearing in mind, of course, that these

will vary from group to group) there will be friction points and horror stories to keep the moral

panickers hot under their collars.

So, our relations are visible when they are mediated using social technologies. But even face to face,

social constructionists see relating as mediated through language.

Words create worlds

Social constructionists view language (and to a lesser extent other forms of interaction/symbols) as

the mechanisms of representation in which we co-create meaning in relation.

The primary emphasis is on discourse as the vehicle through which self and world are articulated,

and the way in which such discourse functions within social relationships

Gergen (1999, p?)

However, in a reaction to this focus on language in relation bring an invitation towards linguistic

reductionism, or a problematic focus only on the representational aspect of the relational, thinkers

such as Ann Cunliffe remind us that we are embodied. This is a concept that goes further than

merely receiving sensory information from our bodies delivered to our mind (as in the Cartesian

dualist tradition). Cunliffe reminds us that we are our bodies.

We therefore do not understand other people, or even objects, solely through acts of intellectual

interpretation, but through sense impressions, gestures, emotional expressions and responsesCunliffe (2008 p?)

George Herbert Mead proposed that there is no thinking or sense of self that is independent of the

social process. Mead posits that we are born with the means to respond to one another through

physical and sensory gestures. Our gestures invite a gestural response. It is through the gesture

response mechanism that we begin to develop a mental representation of the symbolic meaning of

these gesture-response patterns. Language develops when we share a common set of symbols.

Meaning does not lie in the gesture, the word, alone, but in the gesture taken together with the

response to it as one social act.

Stacey (2005 p?)

Social technologies present a challenge to those social constructionists who remind us of our

embodiment, and the interwoven physical/emotional/intellectual gesture response nature of our

relating, in that much of the social constructionist theory about relating and language is based on

how language is used in face-to-face encounters. Much of the interaction in virtual spaces is

asynchronous and based on sharing information encoded in text and picture.

8For a more in depth look at how teens are using social technologies in this way, see the Messing around

section of Hanging out, Messing around and Geeking out by Ito et al, 2010.


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In attempting to understand how this might be understood, ethnographers such as danah boyd have

described social technologies as offering an additional means to perform identity, and drawn upon

the theories of Erving Goffman.

Symbolic interactionism and Identity

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) Goffman frames the notion of identity as one of

continual performance. Goffmans theories are often linked to symbolic interactionism, asociological perspective which contends that meaning is socially constructed through interaction,

language, gesture-response and shared interpretation. In symbolic interactionism, the primary

mechanism for the constitution and performance of identity and self is through collaborative

interaction, primarily speech acts.

Goffman proposed a theatrical metaphor, suggesting we can understand self-presentation as a

performance for a contextually-specific audience. Goffman proposed, in any given situation, people,

like actors, would navigate between frontstage and backstage areas according to context. They

would habitually monitor how others responded to them and make adjustments to their

presentation of self, according to feedback. This might be a highly self-conscious process in

situations of intense visibility (such as when being explicitly public or in a high-pressure first

meeting) but happens in all social situations with different degrees of self-awareness. Thismonitoring behaviour results in a flow of emphasis and de-emphasis activity, as people remain

actively responsive to feedback.

It is through collaborative interaction that actors work to uphold and present preferred self-images

of themselves. They form, reference and bring into their current, granular interactions collective

social norms and values in collaboration with others, who are also in the practice of performance of

their own preferred self-image.

Much of the data about peoples practices in contextual navigation is based on face to face

observational data where it is fairly easy to receive socially significant information about people

(such as race, age, gender, status). When this is absent, for example when ones presentation will be

mediated through a medium where contexts are collapsed, it presents people with choices.

Social technologies offer an environment of varying context collapse, and provide users with

challenges in how they navigate the performance of their identity without immediate contextual

information and feedback.

Social media combine elements of broadcast media and face-to-face communication. Like broadcast

television, social media collapse diverse social contexts into one, making it difficult for people to

engage in complex negotiations needed to vary identity presentation, manage impressions...Unlike

broadcast television, social media users are not professional image makersthey are often

corresponding with friends and family

boyd (2011)

Dr Mariann Hardey describes Meads configuration of the I (the externally oriented self) and the

me (the internally oriented self) as presented through the identity performance of social

technology profiles. She develops a notion of digital self-work9 where we act to

communicate the individual I as a social me or the I who is setting up their profile to display

the equivalent social me. The self exists as an accumulation of personal information, individual

past experiences which also inform the categorisation and intended sharing of content

9based on Shillings notion of body work


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Hardey (in review/pre-publication)

The digital self-work is something the individual is acting in service of constantly working on, and

paying attention to, the level of detail about themselves that may be discovered and presented to

others.

Much of the work looking at representation of self in social technologies has been from aperspective informed by Goffmans work.

The radical nature of the challenge

I believe social technologies present a challenge to all those social constructionists - like Cunliffe -

who rightly remind us of our embodiment and the interwoven physical/emotional/intellectual

gesture response nature of our relating.

Much of the interaction in virtual spaces is asynchronous (that is, not performed at the same time)

and based on sharing information encoded in text and picture. On the one hand, this may then lead

us to assume that this form of relating is disengaged (and actively disengaging) from real

interaction. Indeed, much has been written about the destructive unreality of interactions mediated

through technology (see Turkle, 1994. 1995, 2011). For me, the strength of the theoreticalapplication of Goffmans thinking on identity (and particularly how it has been developed by thinkers

like boyd) is that because it already posits that relating between people is in and of itselfa

mediated experience. And that identity and the construction of experience are co-created in the

relationship and interplay in the spaces. The mechanism of that relating will impact the

experience, certainly, but it doesnt make it unreal.

Phenomenology (and Gestalt theory/practice) can offer an explanation of how we experience

aspects of our world according to what is figural to us.

The success of all media depends at some level on inattention or blindness to the media

technologies themselves (and all of their supporting protocols) in favour of attention to the

phenomena, the content Gitelman (2006 p6)

In The phenomenology of the slowly loading webpage Rosenberger (2007) offers the term

transparency break to refer to a sudden loss of transparency when experiencing the world through

a mediating technology. A transparent experience would be one where the experience of working

through the computer as a tool is figural that is, our awareness of the technology itself is not

figural. When the technology stops working (or doesnt perform as expected as Carol Ann Duffy

would have it, acts as an injured birdinstead of delivering a longed for message) we suddenly

become aware of ourselves, embodied, and view the tool in a new way. One that makes us feel

absurd.

With habitual use of technologies, users perhaps acquire the familiarity to access this transparency

in the tools they use more easily, able to experience the relationship through the tool rather than

experience the tool itself. So, compelling reasons to find that transparency to get through that

feeling of absurdity - may enable people to investigate and explore other means of deriving value

from the relationships.

As well as challenging understanding of how of interpersonal relationships are performed, I believe

this challenge extends to the political sphere. Social technologies used as mediums to support

political activity can help us re-think notions of what might constitute a public sphere. Some of


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the core dynamics of social technology, such as ridiculously easy group formation, easy sharing of

real time data and new ways people find to behave in connected networks are already bringing

about significant social change. I think the concept of publics can be helpfully revisited in this

context.

Social technologies as a mechanism for enabling networked publics

The concept of the publics is core to much of social, political and cultural theories. danah boyd(boyd in Papacharissi (2011) outlines how a conceptualisation of publics can be applied to a

networked context to help understand the dynamics of both.

Publics can be envisioned as both geographical and imagined social spaces where people gather for

social, cultural and/or civic purposes. The notion of publics tends to be used for describing

engagement with groups or communities that are beyond an individuals close friends and family.

This might be local (such as peers) or much broader (such identifying as a member of a nation-state).

Key to the notion of publics that I hope to use to understand peoples participation in networked

publics is a conceptualisation that publics are not only a site of discourse or opinion where our

privately formed identities are brought into the public sphere. Rather, publics themselves are

arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities for the formation and enactment ofsocial identitiesNancy Fraser (1992) in Papacharissi (2011 p41). These identities and practices may

be concerned with creativity and content or social and civic. The key is the mechanism by which

people are participating in group and community behaviours that may be outside their immediate

familial and small group norms.

When people make new publics, they also redefine the idea of the public

Jarvis (2011, p72)

The architecture of social technologies allows the notion of publics to be removed from one rooted

(however tangentially) in geographical location10

. Publics, as with every other social grouping that is

mediated using the internet, can now be created, participated in and performed in a manner

enabled by technology.

Networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such they are

simultaneously 1) the space constructed through networked technologies and 2) the imagined

collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology and practice.

boyd (in Papacharissi 2011, p39)

My Publics

This conceptualisation of publics as social, cultural and civic spaces where people consume, create

and participate, is consistent and helpful to my understanding of some of my interactions on Twitter.

The notion of publics is helpful to me to conceptualise at a micro-level ideas about, who, out of my

network, will respond according to what I post. I mentally hold different publics in mind when Itweet.

But this goes further, from a mechanism of thinking about mechanics (where publics might easily

conflate with communities) towards the more nuanced political notion of the public sphere above.

10However, I note with interest that much of my activity on Twitter and Facebook, my primary social

technology media, has been in support of participation in the geographically bound communities of Sheffield.


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Much of my personal political activity is currently informed by, frequently expressed over and

sometimes organised through Twitter.

My user name, @Erica_Jane_MP was chosen before many politicians were using Twitter. I do

occasionally post political views or statements on Twitter, and frequently get into discussions around

politics and social issues11

. However, Twitter hasnt just been a space where I deliver my fully formed

political thinking to a public forum. It has also been a place to learn and develop my thoughts andopinions with others particularly around issues of freedom of expression on the internet.

Hashtags, which are specialised search functions and one of the core organising functions of Twitter,

can be thought of as impromptu publics

A unique public is created spontaneously and lasts for a short timeand then they disperse

Ev Williams in Jarvis (2011 p145)

These publics are created around sociality such as sharing #10thingsIlove #myfavouritemeal12

- or events. Hashtags, when they serve to connect users around issues or events, can demonstrate

significant social and political impact. For example, after the riots in Summer 2011, #riotcleanup was

used as a hashtag on Twitter by people discussing what a public response to the disorder might be.#riotcleanup became an initial organising mechanism, facilitating discussion and connecting up

people who wanted to act together. RiotCleanup soon turned into a much wider social movement,

as people physically gathered in affected areas with brooms (and networked devices) to ostensibly

reclaim the public space and document their doing so back into the space that originally enabled

their organising.

My attraction to political organising using Twitter is also practical I have used Twitter myself as an

organising mechanism when looking to express my own political views and engage others in

protesting with me. In October 2010, using Twitter as an organising mechanism, @graphiclunarkid

and I organised a well-attended demonstration in Sheffield town centre to protest against the

conviction of Paul Chambers, who was arrested and charged for sending a joke over Twitter to his

(then) 600 followers. If you would like to understand more about the protest, and my thinkingbehind and about it, you can read about it here13

.

Twitter, as a medium, has afforded me the opportunity to forge relationships that emotionally

matter to me with people whom I have never met. It has enabled me to participate in new publics

and organise without organisations.

Id like to explore Twitter as an edge case for understanding other social technologies. I think it can

be thought of as an extreme social network that, through its highly constrained format and limited

additional biographical information, pushes relationship to the fore. Its the hardest to get an overall

sense of without being in it and for that reason, I wanted to work with it.

@Erica_Jane_MP:Twitter and meI joined Twitter in November 2008, after much noisy protest about how useless it was. I engagedwith the medium occasionally, using it mostly to connect with Sheffield based people with an

interest in social technologies. The service really proved its worth to me in April 2010. I was stuck in

11Occasionally with people who think Im an MP by profession, not nomenclature.

12My network particularly seems to enjoy word games, puns and clever wordplay. A recent favourite in my network was

#ZomBeatles, where the aim was to come up with a mashup of Beatles tunes as theyd be heard during the Zombie

Apocalypse13

http://geekgirlwarriorprincess.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/i-am-spartacus/


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Ghana, my flight having been cancelled following the eruption of the Eyjafjallajkull volcano in

Iceland. I began to follow the hashtags #ashtag and #ashcloud and to interact with people who were

also stuck, all over the world. Over the 5 extra days I was in Ghana, Twitter was a news service,

company, comfort and a place to share stories.

To date I have over 1400 followers and follow over 1000 accounts. I have tweeted more than 23,000

times. I use Twitter as a place to be social with friends, engage in political discourse, participate inprotests (and organise protests with others) play games, as a social search and recommendation

engine, to access breaking news and as (public) personal diary.

My blended use of the service is not unique. Twitter initially prompted answers to the question

What are you doing? In 2009, this was changed to Whats happening? Biz Stone, co-founder of

Twitter explained why the change.

a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it's not exclusively aboutpersonal musings. Between those

cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news,

reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

@Biz, 2009

This highly varied use means that people conceptualise it in lots of different ways a fast moving

stream, a flow, a network, a series of connecting loose communities. When asked to describe what

Twitter meant to her, @Em_Cooper offered the following

professionally: keep on top of things, can measure myself against others, quickly test and promote

ideas and products

Personally: its a tribe, a sounding board, a voice, a stage a canvas, a shoulder, and a hug.

@Em_Cooper, 2011

Intellectually, I am interested to understand how people use Twitter both on a micro and macro

level. What new ways of demonstrating intimacy, performing friendships, holding discussions, takingcollective action are people employing, and how are they thinking about their activity? From a

professional perspective, I am engaged on several levels. My participation in my network affords me

a measure of connectivity and ability to achieve certain things I have access to interesting people

that I am not sure how I might have known otherwise. If I had known them through other channels, I

may not have had the opportunity to ask things of them, or respond to them asking of me. Thinking

about (and reading, and watching) the wider organisational impact of people using the service, my

professional offering is informed by an immersive sense of what its like, and what the impacts may

be, in an environment of great change and uncertainty.

For an in depth explanation of Twitter and an exploration of the socio-technical interplay between

structural mechanisms and social mechanics of the medium, see Appendix 1.

Research cycles and methodologyAs referenced earlier, this piece is a revisited one, so my methodology has been developed over

time, according to the needs of the piece, and my interest. In (what turned out to be) my initial

research cycle, I spent a few hours with friends and colleagues, in informal conversation/interview,

asking them to share with me their thoughts on their participation in social technology Twitter in

particular. I also asked my Twitter network to participate in a Twitter based research project where I

tweeted a series of questions over the course of a week. This I then developed into the original

version of this work.


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In the end, my chosen approach didnt enable me to develop the kind of reflective insight (at first

cycle of inquiry and sense making) that was appropriate for this piece. The original research, both in

design and my subsequent working with the data, did not enable me to develop a strong presence in

the subsequent write-up. While its there occasionally, my voice in the responses is not strongly

evident.

My original intent in stepping back was to bring my network to the fore, to see the sense they were

making of their experience (or at least how they described it) and use this to explore avenues of

inquiry that might be useful in an organisational context. I wanted to bring their voices to the table,

so that when I talk of my own experience of Twitter with clients, I do so also knowing that it is not

completely unique.

On reflection, I think my understanding of Twitter as a deeply relational space was one that I wasnt

able to fully convey in the first iteration of this work. I am quite a conversational Twitter user. I

regularly get into conversations (each exchange may only be 140 characters, but they can quickly

build up into meaningful exchanges). The act of choosing a traditional survey was partly to see if

(and how) my network would respond. I was interested in whether my network would participate in

an interaction with me that was quite different to my standard way of being in the space (asdescribed below in more detail). However, in representing their responses, I disappeared.

In rethinking this piece, I engaged in further interviews with three of my clients. I was also

challenged to undertake a wholesale revision of what this writing was for, and what it was intended

to do. This has enabled me to engage with the initial research material in a different way.

What follows is a more personal (re)take on the themes that emerged as interesting to me as a

combination of my research and interviews conducted. I have used these to explore notions of

identity and boundary setting, conceptualisations of audience, and of how people told me they were

thinking about elements of that which they valued in the service. I will then look at how my

immersion in the world of social technologies, such as Twitter, is showing up in my consulting

practice.

Twitter research project

My initial inspiration for a research engagement using Twitter was an article by Alice Marwick and

danah boyds in New Media and Society I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately. Marwick and boyd

asked Twitter users to respond to a series of tweeted questions about their use of the service, with a

particular focus on understanding self-presentation, identity and imagined audience. The responses

they received enabled them to investigate strategies and underpinning philosophies of participation.

I took inspiration from I tweet honestlyfor my overall approach and particularly wanted to do

two things:

1. Ask my network to do something for me something that would require time and effort. Iwas interested to see how they responded

14

2. See how they conceptualised their own participation, to act as a sense check against myown thinking about my participation.

Method

Over the course of 5 days, from 1st

6th

April, 2011 I posed a series of 15 questions from my Twitter

account to 118 invitees. I created a hashtag (#AllinResearch) and used it for each post I made during

the research period. This was to provide a mechanism for keeping track of both questions and

14I will return to this later, when I come to inquire into how my participation in Twitter shows up in my

consulting


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responses, as well as to see if respondents would adopt the hashtag and use it to what extent it

would be become a new public for the duration of the research and beyond. And I set up a blog at

allinresearch.blogspot.com which would provide a longer form explanation of the process and, once

the research was complete, a space to feed back findings to participants and other interested

parties. The blog would display a twitterfall of the hashtag #allinresearch.

Method contextDuring the research method development, as I was crafting the process and investigating tools that

might support me, I was publically narrating my activity over Twitter. I was asking questions,

moaning about challenges and sharing thoughts. My network responded with offers of help for

example @al_vimh wrote me a formula to randomise my followers in Excel, after pointing me in the

right direction to access the Twitter API and download a list of followers from my account.

@Em_Cooper created a TwapperKeeper account for me to collate all the tweets that included the

hashtag #AllInResearch. @Topfife offered me feedback on the invitations process. @DavidH67

offered methodological guidance, practical advice and constructive challenge. In the course of

talking about what I was up to, and the challenges I was facing, I had people offer help, and follow

through on their offers of help when I accepted.

Although I would have probably expressed interest in one of my network doing something similar

and may well have got involved if they asked me to, I was quite touched with peoples generous

responses to my endeavour. I particular, I was struck with just how much work people offered and

carried out for me some of whom Id never met face-to-face or through any other mechanism than

Twitter. This inquiry into a social technology was social in conception, design and practice but

more than that, it demonstrated that this social activity could translate into quantifiable activity.

As described above, this approach was initially designed to help me understand my own

participation in relation to others were other people thinking about Twitter in the way I was? It

was also, in a way, designed to test what this relationship over Twitter means and does. I know I can

have fascinating conversations over Twitter. Could I get my network to take part in something that

wasnt already valued that was different? Something that asked them to relate differently to me?


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SensemakingBefore looking at some of the data that was shared with me in the research, and how I have used

that to explore my own relationship with the medium, I would like to look in more detail about

Twitter as an environment of context collapse. I think understanding this is key to understanding

some of the particular challenges around online identity presentation.

Twitter as an environment of context collapseTwitter is one of the most contextually collapsed social technologies around both in technical

design and in practice, given the widespread sharing of data through the open API15

. That is, users

cannot be sure of who is reading their tweets, and in which contexts. Marwick and boyd (2011)

describe Twitter is a heavily appropriated technology, which participants contextualise differently

and use with diverse networks

As described earlier, Goffmans conceptualisation of identity performance proposed that actors

monitor and respond to contextual cues from their surroundings and other actors, in order to tailor

their presentation of self. Indeed, much of the work looking at representation of self in social

technologies has been from a perspective informed by Goffmans work.

This has concentrated mostly on the practices of identity as enacted by young people, mainly onMySpace, Bebo and Facebook (see Ito et al 2010, boyd 2006, Livingstone, 2010). These Social

Network Sites (SNS) provide varying opportunities for curating and presenting identity through

coding and design (particularly MySpace) media display (pictures, videos) and text, such as About

me notes. Alongside this sits the friends list (making the network visible) and collaboratively

developed content such as public walls where messages are exchanged with friends.

As well as greater static identity display opportunities, other social networking sites allow a greater

measure of network shaping, or audience/friendship control through models requiring public

reciprocity, such as used on Facebook (boyd, 2008) where we have to agree to be friends. Or, more

recently, circles in Google+ which allow for private configurable grouping to allow different

information disclosure choices.

The latent or environmental information available on Twitter is bound in a users profile (160

characters), 1 profile photo, a list of recent tweets, a list of favourite tweets, and a series of numbers

how many accounts the user is following, and how many follow them, and how many tweets they

have posted.

15API stands for Application Programming Interface. Data generated within the Twitter network tool is accessible to

others through an open API. Non-Twitter developers use this, which provides a reasonable expectation of accurate data,

to build third party services on top of the Twitter platform. Services include sharing media, collation, analytical services and

many more.


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Figure 1: A screenshot of my Twitter.com profile

There is limited contextual information to support self-presentation in the way of statically available

identity artefacts (favourite bands, TV shows, political views, employment history) such as offered byother widely adopted SNS. It is (almost) all interaction, all the time.

A simple reading of the digital self-work that has gone into any one Profile is unlikely to reveal any

depth of information about an individual, or means that the individual can be known by in the most

profound sense of the word..[a] digital autobiography appears gradually and over time, at the

intersection of personal information and mediated interactions with others

Hardey (pre-publication)

So, Twitter users are unable to configure private spaces for context, as the friendship and follower

network combined with limited static contextual information and the appropriation of data through

technological openness does not provide a solid boundary for the information they generate. In

short, Twitter users can never be sure who will be viewing the tweets they generate, nor the context

in which they will be read.

Even those with private accounts may have to contend with groups of people they dont normally

bring together family, acquaintances, workmates, and friends depending on who they have

allowed to follow them. This means people have to perform several identities in the same space

never knowing who will be reading them, and what their expectations will be.

The requirement to present a verifiable, singular identity makes it impossible to differ self-

presentation strategies, creating tension as diverse groups of people flow to social network sites

boyd, (2011) in Marwick and boyd (2011, p 122)

Clearly, in the way Id like to imagine bumblebees roundly ignored Victorian engineers who had

conclusively proven that flying bumblebees were impossible, people are managing to get a sense of

themselves and others using the medium. So how are other people and how am I thinking about

who we are? How do others think of their @selves? How I think about @Erica_Jane_MP?

A big grey swash: Identity, audience, boundariesThe following section combines interview and research capta, theoretical explorations and reflective

thinking to explore three related themes that really interested me in the reading, research and

conversations Id had.


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I found I was able to explicitly explore notions of identity more fully with my interviewees, mainly as

the questions I asked in the Twitter research phase were not specifically oriented towards identity as

an articulated concept (although responses to other questions such as who do you imagine

reading your tweets? and what wont you tweet about? provided illuminating insights into

potential underpinning identity conceptualisations).

Hardey (forthcoming) holds that The individual, by nature of digital communication now has the

means to exert hitherto unseen degrees of control over their display, sharing and choice of personal

information.

In my invitations to my network, asking them to take part in my research, I chose a very deliberate

tone. I was highly conscious of the fact that I was presenting myself very differently to a community I

had come to value greatly I felt I could appear as though I was becoming a researcher and

wanted to balance the different needs of the roles of @Erica_Jane_MP and Erica Packington AMOC

student and researcher for an MSc dissertation. So I recognise Hardeys notion ofcontrol

overdisplay in my own behaviours16.

However, in conversation with Jenni, a lecturer in architecture and the built environment, notions ofcontrol werent uppermost in her description of her thinking around her identities. Her account of

her practice is that it is both deliberate, and somewhat self-conscious, but characterised by figuring

it out

Youve got different professional identities as well. Im a teacher, Im a researcher, Im an

employee, and various little things when Im in here. Its not just as simple as professional title. My

home life actually isnt that separate, because what I value and acknowledge academically I also take

with me into my home life I live by the rules that I set myself. So, there is an overlap. Okay, Id like

to draw a line, but actually its really difficult. Rather than drawing a line Im drawing a big grey

swash because I dont really know.

Jenni Barrett17

, interview 6.7.10

Greg uses Twitter in quite a playful way. He has created a series of characters and used them to

explore elements of his personality, to make a political point, to play. However, when we talked

about his own, personal account and how he thinks about his participation as Greg McNeil on

Twitter, we discussed his ambivalence - particularly about how he feels about tone and the way it

comes out.

I dont always like the tone I put, or the way it comes out. I have to be quite confident that I do the

right tone. What I find is that.... Sometimes I just, it can either sound like I know it all or that I'm too

like a grumpy old manit depends on the mood I'm in. I suppose that's the point, how do you apply

consistency, so it's always the same voice....I haven't storyboarded myself

Greg McNeil, interview 29.5.10

In addition, Greg explores the notion of cumulative and persistent data and the conclusion other

people may draw from it about his identity.

16In the final section, where I look at how I being my network to bear in my consulting practice, I examine this

in that context.17

I have chosen to name the people I interviewed in this work, and I have permission from them to do so. I

have anonymised the responses received through other research means.


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They build up and they build up into a picture. So, I could post nothing but stuff about physics, and

everyone would go "he's so into astronomy and so into string theory or whatever" and it might be

what I am looking at or reading. But it's not me. I might be interested in it for a little while...

Greg McNeil, interview

He seems concerned that he might somehow be misrepresented But its not medespite owning

the action of choosing to post it in the first place.

Aden Davies works for a bank.

Going back to tone of voice and greying the line between personal and work so, in work hours, I do

try to keep my Tweets on work topics. I clearly dont do that all the time but I do try and focus on

those things. Im clearly the mosthigh-profile is not the right termIm probably the most

voluminous user of Twitter in the bank. There are a few others around, some in the UK, but not in

any official capacity. So Im just doing my own thing. I say that I work for a bank and if you click

through to the links you would probably get to my Linked-in profile eventually. I work for HSBC, but I

dont tend to shout it out.

Aden Davies, interview 1.06.1018

.

He talks of his Twitter use, and identities in relation to his position as one of the banks most

voluminous user(s) of TwitterThe fact that he doesnt tend to shout it outwho he works for

seems to me to indicate a practice of balancing or at least an active attention to his identities. I

note with interest the reference to personal and workand the caution/reluctance to describe

himself as high-profile. Perhaps, at some level, he sees risk in too much crossover of either identity

into the other? Then again, he seems to enjoy this greying the line between personal and work. He

goes on to say:

Who reads my Tweets? Who reads my blogs? Its kind of playing with fire in one way. You dont

want to come across as serious. You [want to] be a little on the edge but in terms of a bank I have to

be careful, so I do put some thought into what I write certainly. Its just one of those things of how

you want to be perceived, but I do purposely try to be a little bit challenging. Part of me wants to seewhat will get me in trouble.

Aden Davies, interview

Goffmans work on identity makes figural the notion of audience and Markham and boyd explicitly

structured their study I tweet honestlyaround an investigation into imagined audiences. I notice

I have a resistance to using the word audience when it comes to describing my network on Twitter.

It feels too rooted in the dynamics of broadcast (even though Twitter dynamics support broadcasting

behaviours). And, interestingly, in the responses to my question Who do you imagine reading your

tweets? only one used the word audience to describe their network and then to say

I never think about who might read them, it's impossible for me to imagine an 'audience' of

tweeters

Many respondents to my Twitter research found the notion of describing who they imagine reading

their tweets to be a challenging endeavour which could mean that they either find it challenging

describing context, or audience, or both.

18Since this interview, Aden and his employers have begun to explore together the practice of Aden shouting

out that he works for the bank. I would very much like to explore this with him (and his colleagues) in a

further piece of research


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I find it difficult to relate to the concept of not having anyone in mind when writing anything or in

believing that people wouldnt be reading what is written and shared. Even if I dont necessarily

expect people to read what I write, I do imagine that someone will. That said, I have never managed

to sustain writing a private diary and found developing a reflective written voice for this piece

immensely difficult, so perhaps I have a particularly public notion about written communications.

Others had very clear ideas about who they had in mind when they tweeted.

[a family member has] my tweets sent direct to their phone.

Still others had conceptualisations of audience that were more explicitly contextual.

I typically don't, unless in or starting a conversation, in which case the parties referenced by genre,

hashtag or name.//having said that, generally aware of who's following an acct/tag, and that

implicitly informs the content I'll put out

When thinking about organisational use of Twitter there is typically a much clearer intent behind the

use of the medium and thus a more articulated notion of audience. The following is a response

from a local neighbourhood trust in Sheffield.

The reason we started our Twitter account was to have a quick way to share local news to a wider

area. Our tweets are usually about active, local groups and residents so Im hoping that the type of

people that read them are either people who live locally, members of groups or just have an interest

in hearing about local activities and events.

In conversation with Aden, we explored together the effect of having someone identify themselves

as someone who reads your tweets, but doesnt necessarily engage and make that public through

interaction in the space.

Yeah, so you knowsome manager comes up to me and says, Ive read your Tweets. Theyre very

entertaining, It freaks me out because I dont know hes following me So then I knew that theywere listening, so its that kind ofnot thinking that people are listening, but when you find out

that theyare listening and then knowing that they are listening, might alter your behaviour at

some point.


Notions of audience become figural according to circumstance, particularly due to new, existing

relationships joining their network affecting their content choices (and by extension, I surmise, a

conceptualisation of who they imagined reading their tweets)

I gossip about my family on here but when the last girl I dated started following me my date

tweets stopped immediately

As my practice in consulting begins to more explicitly incorporate my Twitter use rather than just

being a consultant who happens to use Twitter, I am exploring being a consultant who brings my use

of Twitter to bear on my work I find myself confronting experiences where people, or

organisations come into my network and suddenly make their presence figural for me.

I recently pitched for a piece of work with a large health charity (work that explicitly incorporated

use of Twitter as part of my professional offering). I found myself faced with a dilemma when, 2 days

before the pitch, I was followed by the organisations Twitter account. I ended up sharing my


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nervousness about the pitch (and mild frustration with the process) in a different, private forum with

friends, having previously been quite open on Twitter about my preparation up to that point. The

latest follower to join had shifted my attention to them as a potential audience for my tweets, and

I chose to modify my behaviour accordingly.

In my role as an organisational consultant, I am used to working with clients with varying levels of

formality, according to organisational culture, the work Ive been asked to do, expectations and mywillingness/ability to challenge those. I tend to operate in a manner that is fairly conversational,

informal and brings a lot of myself into the work I do. I think a lot of my personality comes over in

my Twitter presence, and I actively describe it as my personal account. I am also aware that my

clients may choose to access my feed. Indeed, I rely on my network in order to work effectively for

some of my clients.

This awareness of the muddied boundaries around my account gives me particular pause when it

comes to making language choices essentially whether I swear or not. When I started using

Twitter I made a conscious choice not to swear at all, nor would retweet tweets that contained

strong swearing. I might use low level swear words in conversation with others, but would rarely

tweet them out to my whole network19

.

As I become more comfortable with notions of how I was prepared to describe and think about my

account that is a personal account belonging to someone who is a consultant I began to retweet

tweets that I particularly liked that happened to contain swearing. In a way, this allowed me to test

the water. Would I experience a strong reaction to my decision to do this? Would I get into trouble?

As my experimentation with language choices extended (I remember hovering over the post

button for ages the first time I chose to write the word fuck in a broadcast tweet) I became more

comfortable that my current network doesnt react badly to this (in terms of unfollowing or telling

me off).

Now, I am happy to both retweet and to use swear words in my own tweets, as it feels appropriate

to do so. There are words I wont use, and they are the same words I wont use in any other

environment, spoken or written. Others in my network freely use words I consider to be highlyoffensive, and I have, on occasion, called them out on it and/or unfollowed them when it became

too prevalent or irritated me at the time.

I think, now, my online and offline language styles are roughly consistent to my behaviour in adult

company. I wont swear in a way that I think is gratuitous, but nor will I **** out letters in an

attempt to conceal a swearword. The challenge is that I, of course, have no control over the context

in which my tweets may be read.

When I asked people what they wont or dont tweet about, and what rules they held about

language in tweets, some answers illuminated a pretty strong (but undefined) sense of a boundary

between what was private and public.

Interestingly, Aden felt he was able to approach Twitter to help him decide if a language choice was

appropriate for his internal blog post

I was writing a blog post. I tweeted something like is it appropriate to use the term shiny turd in

an internal blog post? But I put it on an external tweet [laughter]


19As a broadcast tweet. For an explanation of the different types of tweets and how they are used, please see Appendix 1.


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Overall, I believe behaviour will depend on how figural notions of audience or context are at the

time and circumstances of posting, whilst being guided by more deep seated notions of what one

believes to be acceptable behaviour more generally.

I think anything to do with motherhood is off limits in your professional life... But making

homemade jam is okay. Some things are okay and some things arent.

Jenni Barrett, interview

I have an overall sense of who I believe I am as @Erica_Jane_MP. There are some activities or

opinions or subjects I wont (currently) tweet about. I dont use my daughters name in full, nor do I

name my clients, unless I feel its appropriate to publically own my work with them. However, I know

I am likely to modify my behaviours on Twitter if a particularly important person comes into my

network such as a family member, friend, colleague, client and makes their presence figural in

my mind as I tweet.

Whats the value?

I want to have a look at what I and others have described as important to us about Twitter - what we

value.

When I asked my respondents to describe what they valued about Twitter, the responses were

almost entirely focussed on social aspects of the experience. Particularly highly regarded by

participants, alongside more general references to people and community, were serendipitous

connection and the medium as a space for social search and recommendation. In a response that

sums it up beautifully:

The people I meet and can talk to, and the ad-hoc conversations I get into, both of which I have no

equivalent means for // Also it's my main source of news, "peer reviewed" in a sense, I like it much

better than newspapers

I now want to have a closer look at the twin, connected notions of social search and serendipity two of the functions I enjoy about Twitter that I also recognise have greatest application to my

professional role.

Social searchA strongly valued aspect of peoples experience on Twitter centres on the filtering, signposting and

information sharing activity through connected networks.

We who go online often end up crowd-sourcing our lives, pulling ourselves into the hands of others.

We go to twitter or facebook and ask friends there where we should go to lunch, what we should buy

or how to solve a problem. More often than not we get suggestions.

Jarvis (2010 p148)

Ash has created a network heavily populated with software engineers and systems thinkers. He

talked about his use of Twitter as a social search and social knowledge sharing process.

It is a really quick way of finding out about thin

All in: An inquiry into being a technically social consultant, by Erica Packington

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