Comments on: on the power of banality http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/10/13/on-the-power-of-banality/ apparently much happier in person Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:03:04 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: Rob Wall http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/10/13/on-the-power-of-banality/#comment-127534 Rob Wall Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:07:39 +0000 http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/10/13/on-the-power-of-banality/#comment-127534 "Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But - the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates." All the micro-conversations we have every day - "How ya doin", "What's new?", etc. - serve an important role in community building. All social animals have ways of maintaining connections between them. Ants and other insects do it with pheromones. Primates like us maintain connections by grooming behaviours. You see this in our hairy cousins like chimpanzees and gorillas by their actual grooming of each other - picking through each others hair to remove ticks, lice and other parasites. Short of actually mating, that's as personal of a connection as I can imagine. Sadly we lack the long body hair and parasites that come with it, so actually grooming each other like this is not practical (or socially acceptable). We use language as a sort of virtual grooming behaviour. All the banal greetings and exchanges might be almost meaningless, but they have an important function in maintaining our social connections. Twitter is a simple way of maintaining social presence at very little cognitive cost. I agree with you 100% about Facebook. I want my social interactions to come to me instead of me having to go to them. “Twitter is important because it makes many of the intangible human connections more readily available to people who are separated by distance. I often feel more closely integrated with the people on my Twitter stream than I do with people who work in my department. Why is that? I see those people every day. But – the people on Twitter are constantly reinforcing my connection with them, and vice versa, through the unceasing flow of status updates.”

All the micro-conversations we have every day – “How ya doin”, “What’s new?”, etc. – serve an important role in community building. All social animals have ways of maintaining connections between them. Ants and other insects do it with pheromones. Primates like us maintain connections by grooming behaviours. You see this in our hairy cousins like chimpanzees and gorillas by their actual grooming of each other – picking through each others hair to remove ticks, lice and other parasites. Short of actually mating, that’s as personal of a connection as I can imagine. Sadly we lack the long body hair and parasites that come with it, so actually grooming each other like this is not practical (or socially acceptable). We use language as a sort of virtual grooming behaviour. All the banal greetings and exchanges might be almost meaningless, but they have an important function in maintaining our social connections.

Twitter is a simple way of maintaining social presence at very little cognitive cost. I agree with you 100% about Facebook. I want my social interactions to come to me instead of me having to go to them.

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