StigmergicWeb

Life is now in post project mode, meaning I get to re-acquaint myself with some long forgotten activities such as doing housework/yardwork, sleeping for more than 5 hours a night and the ever popular wasting my time online. My first distraction from WISBD (”what I should be doing” which in this case is marking some Biology 20 assignments) is Twitter. If you are interested in how I am wasting time, here’s my twitter page

So far, I am at Alan Levine’s second stage of the twitter life cycle. I still don’t get it. But after two entries, I’m not in a position to make a thoughtful reflection. So far, it seems like a kind of web-based social Skinner box - keep tapping at those keys and checking on your friends, and you will be occasionally rewarded. I expect it is a random schedule of reinforcement, like slot machines, so infrequent small reinforcement produces a behaviour that extinguishes very slowly. It is, in other words, designed to be addictive. Well, it’s too late - I’m already in. I’m just worried that twitter is a gateway social networking tool that eventually leads to harder stuff like MySpace. I promise to restrict myself to being an occasional twitterer - just a few tweets on weekends to relax with friends!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 23:17 and is filed under read-write web, small pieces, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.