how am i known? let me list the ways
Ok, so as you may or may not know, my thing is performance of identity in virtual spaces. I’m particularly drawn to the symbolic interactionism perspective on identity performances, and the way we use signs to construct and reconstruct our identities, and to receive feedback on those constructions.
And last night, looking at my twitter feed, I realized there is perhaps one underexplored, symbolic way of getting feedback on the identity we perform on twitter.
Lists.
No, wait, hear me out. A list is someone else’s attempt to categorize your twitter feed into a labeled grouping. You perform the twitter feed (which is a specific form of language use*). People (your ‘followers’) read these tweets, which can be considered sign objects (still not sure how irreducible a tweet is though, tbh) and interpret them (often in relation to other signs, prior texts or experiences, familiarity with the form, etc). They then can choose to either ignore the tweet (especially easy since twitter requires such a low investment), read the tweet but not respond, or read and respond (replying, retweeting, or creating a new tweet in that theme that may or may not share a #hashtag).
That’s all pretty straightforward social communication. But lists lay an identity reading element over the entire process. A list is a judgment of an overall evolving social identity. A list is in the control of the reader of that identity, not the author. A list is a public declaration of who others think you are.
To wit: let’s look at my main twitter account and see what identities I am listed with. A basic grouping over coffee (hey, this is a blogpost, not a scholarly article, I can be crude in my metric!) gives the following breakdown of lists mentioning @erikapearson:
Retweets/Key Followers: 7 (ex: conversationalists; ppl_who_reply, ppl_I_retweet)
Twitter Management: 1 (filtered reading)
Geographical Location: 15 (ex: kiwis, dunedinites)
Occupation: 29 (ex: underlings, technologists, teaching)
Interests: 5 (ex: doomsplayers, swancon, literature)
Discounting twitter management (and I’m actually surprised there was only one of those), we can see from this list that my followers read my twitter identity is being about my work (which may also overlap into geographical, since I am situated at a university campus), the fact that I reply/engage with other twitterers, with a smattering of other interests. That there are also some teasing lists (i.e.: pesky_australians) suggests a respectable amount of social capital/goodwill is also at play on this weak-tie network.
That’s reassuring for me, since this is my work twitter account, and I use it to maintain my weak tie network particularly across NZ and Australia, but also with my discipline colleagues around the world. So my listed identity tallies well with my intended, performed, symbolic identity.
What does your lists say about your twitter identity?
* one day I’ll write a blogpost about the linguistic characteristics of twitter. I promise!
