Twitter: The Sense of Belonging

A few months ago I wrote about Romancing the Tweet and what I’d discovered in my early journey with this foreign and strange social medium. Because of something that occurred yesterday, I realize it’s time for an update.

Yesterday a fellow Twitterer posted links on his website of six Twitter friends (including me). He wrote a brief sentence about each of us (Winslow Eliot is “A writer, teacher and wonderful lady who’s scared of my books at night!”) He even included a thumbnail of each of us.

Claude Bouchard is a fellow-writer. He’s written four books, and he sent me the first one, Vigilante, that I’m reading right now. (It’s an action-packed thriller, a bit gruesome for tender, romantic me to read late at night, which explains his comment, but it’s good.) To me, Claude exemplifies the classic, or ‘ideal’ Twitterer: he uses Twitter to develop relationships. Every morning I get a good morning from him. He promotes me to his other friends by re-tweeting something I’ve posted he finds interesting. He connects us by linking us together. He’s encouraging and amusing and light-hearted (in spite of Vigilante). I think if you asked any of these other folks who have gotten to know him, they’d say the same thing. We’ve found a friend. And through him, we’ve found each other.

I’m following over 600 people now, and certainly don’t count most of them as my friends, but Claude isn’t the only one who makes me feel appreciated and friendly. Many tweets that come through are obviously automatic; these don’t engage at all with anyone else: they’re just meant to garner hits onto a web site. There’s no connection, and I ignore them. They don’t offer what I mentioned in my earlier post about Twitter: a sense of community or ‘tribe.’ But for those of us who do connect, this sense of ‘tribe’ continues to become ever more strong and delightful. In addition to my writers-tribe, I’m feeling my way into a growing ‘teacher tribe.’ Yesterday I connected with the beginnings of a Hawaii-tribe. I have a sense of belonging. Maybe a tribe member isn’t a friend in the traditional sense, but nothing about Twitter is traditional. As Glen Gilmore writes: “[On Twitter,] you’re not in Kansas any more.”  (In“7 Social Media Lessons”, Gilmore compares Twitter to Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, for those of you who’d like a literary analogy.)

How can one feel friendly towards a person with whom one only communicates 140 characters at a time, in a vast network of millions of users? That’s a mystery. There still are some mysteries, you know. But just because it’s a mystery, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.