Last Friday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sat down for an hourlong candid conversation with New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, about the role and impact of the social media giant in society.
I admit I'm not a big user of Twitter - I don't post a lot and have less than 1,400 followers - but I'm one of its loyal fans and use it regularly as part of my research process, whether when I write a story for Forbes or a client report for my firm, Atherton Research.
One of the topics that resonated with me during the hourlong discussion was the role Twitter plays in the world of news.
Fluidity: Message vs Post
"And the way I look at Twitter is that it’s a part of the news system. It’s a fundamental part of the news system. It’s become part of the infrastructure of the news system, which is why anybody who pays attention to the news closely knows that news usually breaks on Twitter," said Rosen.
"And they cycle. Sometimes those discussions become what’s happening and become news as well. And to your point around ... Twitter was described in the past, I’m not sure who said it, as where the news gets its news," replied Dorsey.
Why Twitter CEO despised his company being described as a Microblogging site
The Twitter CEO also compared the fluidity and user behavior between the social media platform and Instagram, Facebook's popular photo- and video-sharing service.
What I appreciate about Twitter is, unlike in Instagram, it doesn’t feel like a post. It feels like the start of a... It feels like a message," added Dorsey "Fluidity... We don’t want to post and then stop. One of the descriptions and labels that we had in the past, which I always despised, was microblogging, because... It encourages the behavior of post, comment, comment, comment, and it just feels such to be a dead end versus message, message, message, message, which is just a fluid reply, and it could go anywhere.
Interest graph vs. Social graph
The co-founder of Twitter also pointed out another major difference between Twitter and Facebook: The social graph.
We don’t have a social graph. We have a graph around interest. We have people following you not because of the fact that you’re in their address book, but because they’re interested in what you have to say, and the spectrum of what you have to say changes over time, and that fluidity is really important and isn’t really captured in, “I’m composing a post.” It’s like, “this is what I think right now, and this is what I think right now, and let me clarify, and let me clarify, and this is what I think right now.”
Why you can't find echo chambers on Twitter
Finally, Dorsey briefly touched upon the notion of "filter bubbles" or "echo chambers" created by social media giants' algorithms and that show people only the content that aligns with their views and why you can't find that happening on Twitter.
I think the one advantage that we have against our peers is the fact that it is just completely open and completely fluid and completely public. I think when you have a join button or a subscribe button into a small community or a close community, you develop a lot of these really isolated sorts of bubbles, where things can really fester quite quickly, and it’s also hard to see what’s going on inside.
