Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

Consider the following tweets, taken at random from twitter a few minutes ago:

• Going to bed feeling good. you are a godsend. I love you partner.

• I just got a hair cut!!!

• need to do a little meditation, then dive back in. hope by tmrw to have my
  broke shit all fixed; both physical & metaphysical.

• Looking volunteers for a Himalayan holiday  

What is going on here?

All Tweets Have A Conscious or Subconscious Purpose

Some of these have a clear purpose - to say thank you, to recruit people for a trip, etc.

Another popular use is blatant or subtle self-promotion.  Check out my web site, see how cool i am, etc.

But what about the “I just got a hair cut!!!” post?  This very minor status update seems hardly worth it.  Does anyone really care?

Or is the point of trivial updates to test the waters and actually see if people care about the little things in your life?

Tweets are Diffuse and Unreliable

As I see it, there are a few drawbacks to using twitter these days:

• Launching comments off into the void eliminates directness.  It’s like walking into a party and making statements at the room instead of at a person.  The opposite of intimate.
• Functional comments to get work done are great, but right now twitter lacks the critical mass to do real work.  Phone calls or emails are much better.
• Blatant self promotion is annoying.

But it’s still early days with twitter and the time is ripe to explore new ways of communicating.

Perhaps this week I’ll try an experiment and post more casual status updates, just to see what happens.  But what to post?

Tweets are a Subset of The Unconscious Thoughts of Many Many People

Consider the following sets:

• things I post is a subset of
• things I consider posting is a subset of
• thoughts I consciously have which is a subset of
• all thoughts I have conscious or unconscious

At each stage in the hierarchy there is a filter.  Perhaps the most interesting filter is the very first one, between thoughts conscious and unconscious.  But one of the bizarre things I’ve noticed about myself is that my “things I consider posting” category typically has more negative thoughts than positive thoughts.

For example, I recently dropped a board on my foot which caused me to limp for a few days.  The amount of pain an inconvenience made it very noteworthy to my subconscious mind, and I thought about posting about it.  Was I looking for sympathy on the internet?  And if so is there any sympathy to be had out there?  And if I did tweet about every little injury does that make me a hypochondriac?

I also think about posting about issues or problems that I’m having, but not so much when times are good.  “No news is good news” seems to apply even for me.  Or is this principle just a filter that I have been raised to believe?  What if my filter worked the other way - that I felt compelled to share positive news and no particular motivation to share negative news.

Should We All Try to be Super-Positive?

I know some people who are very careful to always present an optimistic exterior, at least in verbal statements.  If you talk to these people for any period of time it is not too hard to see the wheels turning and the way they are careful to package their statements in positive language.

In general, though, avoiding negativity has very positive effects and these super-positive people seem better than average at building and maintaining relationships.

Still there seems something slightly sinister about it.  It seems sometimes that conflict is a little bit more direct.  I need to think about this some more.