Last night, I attended my first "twestival." For those of you not familiar with the term, it means "Twitter festival" -- basically, a meetup consisting of users of the micro-blogging site Twitter. The Philadelphia Twestival is an annual event, and is one of more than one hundred twestivals occurring around the world.
What I liked about this event was that it was more than your standard meetup; it was a congregation of sincere, genuine people willing to support an important cause and help each other out. The event was fully organized by volunteers, and ticket proceeds (including admission, raffle, and Rock Band tickets) benefited charity:water. Many people bought extra tickets just to support the charity.
The majority of the people at the event either worked in social media or had a profound interest in social media. There were many independent consultants in the group too. I was pleased to find that most people were interested in collaborating or helping each other out, rather than promoting themselves or their businesses. The vibe was friendly and positive, and I made several new friends.
What surprised me the most was the fact that many of the attendees recognized each other. When my friend and I walked in, he pointed to someone and said "Hey, she got engaged a couple of months ago!" I asked if my friend knew her, and he said that he recognized her from her profile picture on Twitter. This was the case with many attendees. If you watched them interact, you would think they'd known each other for months or years -- which, in a sense, is true.
It's amazing what technologies like Twitter can do. The event reminded me of concepts mentioned in the book Here Comes Everybody -- people making connections through social technologies, and forming lasting relationships through these connections. Because of the open communication and comfort level that these technologies foster, people are empowered and feel a genuine need to "give back."
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3 comments:
I first noted/proposed/prophesied the decoupling of geography and relationships by the internet you note in this blog post in 199- hmm, 4, 5? Twitter takes the next step and decouples relationship from one-to-one communication in the same fashion as a personal website or blog but with the additional aspect of the _instant_; discrete acts of textual creation become a medium for succoring, supporting, and even creating new relationships in an ongoing event between people. The pervasiveness of nearly-instantaneous communication technology we see today, some would say dilutes the interpersonal; I disagree. Far from "perverting" the face-to-face, I would suggest that such technologies lead to a multiplication of relationship possibilities as real as those experienced by Civil War-era letter writers and humans stretching back to before the dawn of written speech. And in fact the existence of the Twestival itself reinforces the idea that the sorts of communications which only in the past 15 years have become possible are an extension of the repertoire of ways we humans interact - and that something in us still longs for the face-to-face.
This is probably why I moved away from my degree in anthropology to work in the field that makes things like this possible.
Kudos for what you do -- I think social technologies are indeed reinforcing personal, REAL relationships -- especially in today's American society, where it's considered out-of-place to talk to a stranger face-to-face but fine to do so online.
Also, lemme get out a dictionary...
Sorry, occupational hazard of an anthro BA/english minor. I normally hide it better than than.
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