Cykod Web Development and Consulting Blog

Until I published this blog post I didn't actually believe that twitter was going to destroy our country, unfortunately now I do.

If that last sentence doesn't make sense, let me explain by way of anecdote: I remember having a conversation with a former schoolmate a few years ago at a reunion that went something like this...

Me: Are you still into Dave Matthews as much as you used to be?
Him: Dave Matthews, Naw, I never liked them all that much.
Me: What - that's all you talked about senior year - you literally wouldn't shut up about them.
Him: I think you have me confused with someone else.

Now, assuming my increasingly disappointing memory hadn't failed me - I'm pretty sure he was the obnoxious, over the top DMB fan I remember. Of course a decade plus later, I can't be 100% sure it was him - it really might have been someone else.

If only we hadn't gone to high-school in the bad old days before everyone tweeted, facebook'd (or now buzz'd I guess) their every daily minutia and fleeting opinion, I could have nailed that kid to his over-the-top-pyschofan opinions. What would he have done then? We'll since the "deny it" option had flown the coop he would have been left with two choices:

a. Stay consistent with his opinion from years ago in high-school
b. Cop to his former obsession but admit he has moved on.

The obvious choice would be b - he clearly doesn't feel the same way about the band as he used to - but unfortunately we as human beings have a hard time being inconsistent. We find it repulsive. Hobgoblins notwithstanding, our hatred of inconsistency in our actions and beliefs is explained by a well known theory called Cognitive Dissonance. I've seen a friend stick to provably false "facts" they've written about on Facebook simply because they don't want to be seen as inconsistent.

"The person whose beliefs, words and deeds don't match is seen as confused, two-faced, even mentally ill. On the other side, a high degree of consistency is normally associated with personal and intellectual strength." (p.53, Influence, Cialdini, 2001)

If you can recall back to the 2004 election, one of the prime strikes against senator Kerry (ok, besides his wooden demeanor) was that he was a flip-flopper. This fact was contrasted with GW "stay-the-course" Bush. While in the abstract we might prefer our politicians to be able to take new evidence into consideration and change their minds, in reality we prefer them not to change their minds to often (Remember Doonesbury's reader-chosen characterization of Bill Clinton?) 

If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on the record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment. (p.59, Influence, Cialdini, 2001)

What is microblogging but an easily-posted, bite-sized, on-the-record commitment? For many of us it's no longer enough to have opinions - we now need to scream them to the entire world. This effectively carves those originally transient opinions into stone and makes us less likely to consider evidence contrary to our stated positions on policy, politics, or whatever.

Since micro-blogging is so accessible - people now post just about anything from just about anywhere - it creates a particularly dangerous combination: a medium that encourages us to make a public commitment based on something we often have only experienced shallowly & fleetingly.  It's less important to a politician that your 100 followers know you "Stand with [Candidate]", than the fact that you made the commitment to post that in first place (and are now more susceptible to requests for money and help.)

By taking public positions too early (sometimes years early - e.g. "OMG [Politician Name Here] is the greatest [s]he'll be prez in 2012!!!!!" ) we deny ourselves the chance to take in more evidence before settling on a final position for possibly important decisions,  reducing what should be lively well-reasoned debates into dogmatic fear-mongering flinging of FUD to maintain our committed positions against any opposition.

To get back to the divide and destroy our country thing - clearly I wouldn't title a public blog post that way unless I wholly believed the thesis, so now I'm going to have to spend the rest of 2010 railing on the evils of microblogging. Oh well, should be fun. 

Think before your tweet because you will end up thinking what you tweet.

 

We've finally done an official release of our Ruby on Rails based Content Managment System Webiva. Webiva represents thousands of hours of development and use over the past 3 years and we are really proud of what we ended up with. Take it for a test drive at demo.webiva.net or check out more details at Webiva.org