Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing someone to follow you forced reciprocation. That is, in turn, you were forced to follow your followers. Personally, this situation has always been troublesome: I’ve wanted to keep my Twitters private, mostly to prevent Google from indexing them – not because I’m sharing anything particularly salacious. However, as allowing followers had costs, I was forced to be selective about who was allowed in.
The particular costs of “fame” in Twitter are interesting, not only for their anachronistic nature (direct costs of fame on the web?), but the way they shape the system and uses. I’ve been forced to think of my Twitter stream as a budget. I may like you, and allow you to follow me, but if you post 30 Twitters a day you blow my information budget, and I’m forced to close the connection. I’ve wondered how the distributed cognitive processes of community have shaped norms around posting in response to budgeting. Since fame implies costs, and there is mutual understanding of these costs, have we evolved practice that shapes discourse to our information budgets?
Now that Twitter allows asymmetrical private following, it is interesting to think about how the site changes. At one level, Twitter becomes more like the rest of the web: when you subscribe to my RSS feed, there is no expectation that I’m reading yours. I can now “allow” high-producing followers without worry of my information budget. At face value, all of these things seem “good” and “normal.” It is also useful to think about the consequences of this change, as privacy practice has very literally shaped community in Twitter.
Dourish and Anderson, in the 2006 paper Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as a Social and Cultural Phenomena, describe privacy as a process, one “embedded in social and cultural contexts.” The authors present models of privacy – and I find the particular model of privacy as discursive practice applicable in the case of Twitter. The (admittedly brute-force) nature of privacy in Twitter has shaped our relations to one another, forcing the development of particular practice and strategies of community management. As fame has costs, our information budgets directly enforce our notions of community.
Interestingly, the costs of fame may have beneficial effects on community. To allow in private followers meant reciprocal information disclosure, a social information processing transaction. Within SIP, we develop our own strategies of reading-in, filtering, and information management – that is, we get to know our community. Like it or not, this forms tight bonds, feelings of closeness, and a unique form of community unlike others on the web. I don’t think that the privacy changes will disrupt community in a catastrophic way, but it is useful to think about how this reshaping of privacy to fit more “normal” patterns will shape the lived experience of those on Twitter. Our followers transform themselves from costs to free-riders, and privacy is reimagined from control of utterances and information budgets to simply control of utterances.
The point of this analysis is not to make value judgements about Twitter’s privacy practice, but rather to highlight how decisions about privacy shape the experience of technology. Dourish and Anderson argue that we should explore “privacy and security as social products rather than natural facts.” In this context, perhaps both the previous “forced reciprocal” and current “free-rider” approach to privacy in Twitter are equally arbitrary. Notably, the effects of either approaches on community will not be arbitrary, and this is the important takeaway for the interaction designer.
Cited:
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. (2006). Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319–342.
