Commentary: $44 billion can buy Twitter, but it can’t buy respect
“I think more and more people realize what Twitter has done for us, is a massive part of why the stock price has gone up so much,” says Paul S. Fishman, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and a senior fellow with the American Brain Society.
In a talk at the University of Toronto, Fishman called Twitter a “walled garden.” By building a platform that allows you to control what you do on it, while at the same time being able to build followers and a following, Twitter’s users have become experts at controlling what information they share and to whom.
Twitter has been a valuable tool for those who can get the attention of others. This is a phenomenon that has been called “the golden mean” in which people create Twitter identities that provide attention-grabbing information, while also remaining hidden from those that might not be interested in what they’re sharing.
But over time, this means that those who are building their Twitter identities and sharing information on the platform, are also learning how to get their message out. So as Twitter has grown in popularity, so has the importance of maintaining a careful balance between the two.
“I think this is the most important thing to understand about Twitter, and about the role of Twitter within our social world: it is not just what you share or what you tweet about, but how you use it to build a real-time audience,” says Paul Graham, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies computer networks.
“If you’re building your identity, you’re learning what buttons to push, how to get attention where you want it, how to promote your brand to people who aren’t even using Twitter, and you’re also building your following, which is important for your brand, your company and all kinds of other things. This is why it is so important to know how and why people are actually using
