A twittering experiment
I am going to use my twitter feed – http://twitter.com/zern – to deliver a constant stream of visual, aural, emotive, olfactory snippets of nows.
As a source of idea germs, to spark divergent thinking.
In response to my article Problem solving model: Four phases on FlyingSolo, Heather Smith from Brisbane asked for my thoughts on brainstorming alone.
One of my suggestions was: “Look for unrelated words and concepts and see how you can find potential solutions in them, however wacky these may be.”
Maybe using my twitter feed to supply this stream of unrelated concepts and observations, with a focus on my emotional state at each point, will provide a source of idea prompts.
On a personal note, it will also encourage me stop and observe each moment of now.
So click over to http://twitter.com/zern and follow me!
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This is a potentially interesting use of Twitter, and similar to Brian Yap who tweets snippets of overheard conversations.
I wonder, though, how it makes you look on Twitter…
As this essay says, “I’m constantly taken by the casual intimacy of Twitter friends — people I’ve never met yet I know that they had a rough interview, or their cats are hungry, or they are giving a lecture tomorrow, or just saw a crazy person dancing on Wall St, or that they think Indiana Jones represents the Marxian class struggle. Normally you only get this spread of data about someone if you’re close friends and physically near them on a regular basis.”
Your plan for Twitter places a broadcast beacon into the Twitterverse, tweeting its little observations. But how does it interact with the other people there, to create a presence for you, Zern Liew? It doesn’t.
Perhaps it’d be better if this role was performed by a robot, and the “zern” Twitter account was you — the fully-rounded human being.
[...] A twittering experiment | eicolab: An interesting use Twitter, with a comment added by yours truly. [...]
How indeed will this use of twitter make me look? Very interesting question.
Is it even possibly to present any sense of a “rounded person” via a stream of 160 characters?
We are only ever reading a tiny sliver of a person on twitter anyway. I would think it will be next to impossible for a total stranger to “know” me via twitter alone. For these people, perhaps this experiment would provide useful from an idea-germs perspective; or perhaps a trigger for self-reflection on their present moment.
For others who do know me, then this is an unusual use of twitter. There is minimal explicit information about what I am doing. At best you can guess by inference. Yet at the same time this is very intimate and real – you are seeing what is going through my senses at each moment.
How does this interact with others? Perhaps not overtly. The interaction is between each reader and themselves, triggered by my twitterings.
(Gawd, now this sounds like some full-on, take-it-all-too-seriously, performance art piece LOL)
Cool to see we had the same idea
I actually got my inspiration for this from edward di bono and his book “i am right you are wrong”, which, although very badly written, is definitely worth the read.
rigby uses the random dictionary approach but also throws in capitalisation and punctuation-mergings to create interesting scenes. i’m half-wondering if it wouldn’t be more interesting if he posted just one or two words, instead of so many. it’s definitely an interesting field.
One or two words eh?! Hmmm. This is getting into the territory of minimalist poetry…
Another idea I am toying with is posting random “readings”, like an oracle who does not hear the questions. And to some readers somewhere, these readings would make sense or be clear answers to their questions.
Eg: The red bird will realise its predicament at a most inopportune moment. Avoid the tea.
Sort of playing with serendipity, alignment of “energies” and thoughts etc. Or maybe we are getting to “out there” now?
Nope, love that idea.
I kind of hope rigby does such things; but targeting that sort of message specifically would be really interesting; specially if it maintains some sort of “vaugity” such that we can apply it to ourselves as we see fit.
The one or two words would be nice because it would make you think them over more, as opposed to having a bunch of which one which to spread your attention.
For example if I say to you
“friendliness”
and then I ask you to apply that concept to all aspects of your business, maybe you will improve something. Targeted idea-generating approaches like that can be very valuable i feel.
Keywords; to adapt to your situation as you feel fit…
Keywords generated from my current state. I still like the idea of using this as a way for me to stay present.
I’ll give this a go.