Am 1. Juni veröffentliche das Harvard College auf ihrem Blog eine Studie zweier MBA Studenten, welche sich über die Verhaltensweise vom 300.000 User bei Twitter genauer angeguckt haben. Das Twitter Verhalten wurde dann mit dem Verhalten anderer online social networks verglichen.
Dabei wurden unterschiedliche Feststellungen getätigt, zum Beispiel erzeugen zehn Prozent aller Twitter-Nutzer 90 Prozent aller Tweets in dieser Studie.
Wer mehr darüber erfahren möchte klickt hier: Harvard Business Publishing
I found the “New Twitter Research” article by a graduate student to be very limited in resources, scope, and argumentation: I couldn’t see the point of it, quite frankly, and so I’ve been looking for studies that evaluate the role of social networking in economic and social life more generally and have found one that I think would interest the readers of this blog.
It is called Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index, by John Seely Brown, John Hagel, and Lang Davison, and it is organized around such concepts as lowering barriers to entry, shifts in value from stocks of knowledge to flows of knowledge, and how these shifts are shaping the economic playing field — to paraphrase headings in the introduction.
Where the human and social activities of “New Twitter Research” are limited to demographics to the point, in my view, of trivializing human activity, Brown’s study offers a much more substantive and highly-differentiated modeling of activity, which for the topic of social roles is nicely illustrated on page 76, the “Social Technographics Ladder”, as it distinguishes among such consumer roles as creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
More generally, I think readers of this 140 page study would find themselves with a comprehensive framework that suggests we set aside the discussion of particular technologies to evaluate instead how these technologies are changing the ways businesses function and compete: that our study of the role of “twitter” might better be done by using the conceptual frameworks and advice offered by such fields as economics, sociology, political science.
I’d like to suggest that this text become part of the syllabus for our various web projects at the HWR — that we see “e-learning” not simply as an online copy shop, whose merit is limited to convenience, or an online chatter box, which while important for the building of community and communications and the liberation of the human spirit, remains a mere communications “service” essentially marginal to the disciplines, and thus, to the HWR’s main business.
I believe the article outlines what many of our disciplines might find if they were to look at social networking’s role in their fields as well as the social networking skills many of our students would do well to learn and demonstrate before leaving us.