I’m officially a twit.
That’s what you call folks who use Twitter, right? I’m still new to this thing, so I’m not so sure of all the terminology.
I never thought I would join Twitter. I never really saw the point, and anyone who’s read one of my movie reviews knows it takes me far more than 140 characters to get to the point.
But a friend of mine—probably wanting to up her burgeoning legion of followers—encouraged me to join the Twitterverse, so (apparently being a follower by nature) I did. I’ve now been tweeting for a couple of weeks and still have no clue as to what I’m doing.
You’d think it’d be easy. Friends tell me just to tweet about what’s going on in my life—what I ate for breakfast (Raisin Bran), what sort of socks I’m wearing (ones with holes in the toes), that sort of thing. And, theoretically, that should pose no problem. My favorite subject to write about would appear to be, in fact, me: Through the first five paragraphs of this post so far, I’ve done nothing but write about me, and some of you may be wondering when I’ll actually say something relevant.
In that (and here comes some relevancy), I’m not alone. According to a cadre of Harvard neuroscientists, we love self-disclosure. We get a strange rush of fulfillment when we talk about ourselves, much as we do as when we eat or (if we’re happily married) have sex.
In the study (reported in Time), researchers analyzed brain activity in subjects as those subjects talked about themselves—paying close attention to their mesolimbic dopamine systems. (Your brain doles out dopamine as a feel-good “reward” for all sorts of things, from doing well on a math test to buying a cool pair of shoes.) No surprise that when subjects talked about themselves their dopamine systems grew more active. Moreover, if the subjects thought their opinions would be circulated among an even wider circle of folks, they got an extra surge of dopamine: The bigger the audience we have, the more we seem to like it.
Researchers also offered a bit of cash to those same subjects—sometimes giving more money to folks if they’d answer a question related to someone else (say, “How much do you think Kim Kardashian likes to ski?”) instead of a question about themselves (“How much do you like to ski?”). Researchers found that some subjects would give up money so they could talk about themselves.
Self-disclosure is a big reason why social networking outlets like Facebook and Twitter are so successful. More than 80% of tweets, Facebook posts and other online missives we read are, in the words of the scientists, “announcements about one’s own immediate experiences.”
I have a sort of dual reaction to all of this. First, I totally buy Harvard’s conclusions. As we’ve established, I have very little problem talking about myself.
But for whatever reason, I feel weird about doing that sort of self-revelatory talking on forums like Facebook or Twitter. And I think I know the disconnection:
You’ve come to read this little blog post on your own initiative. I didn’t make you come, and if you get tired of me, you can leave anytime you want. But on Facebook and Twitter, my little missives actually land on other people’s newsfeeds and Twitterfeeds. In the former case, it’s kinda like you’re coming over to my place so we can sit down and chat. In the latter, it feels as though I’m pounding on your door, uninvited, so I can tell you about my socks.
Now, maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. When I’m on Facebook, I love to read what my friends have to say about their days and their kids and even their breakfasts. Maybe I’m just too neurotic for my own good. Perhaps, on my very next tweet, I’ll have a sudden epiphany on how to maneuver through my own little space in the Twitterverse.
Or maybe I’ll just condense this post into 140 characters or less.
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