Twitter and the death of distance

It's something we already know, or at least have suspected for a long time. Social media sites such as Twitter span huge distances to connect people around the world. My own father, now 84 years old, started a Facebook account so he could keep in touch with distant relatives in such places as New Zealand and Australia. He's having a whale of a time. There are many stories of people developing and sustaining friendship, or even romance and eventual marriage, after 'meeting' on a social media site. I have co-authored several books with colleagues whom I have never met, where social media tools were used to co-create the content across the distance. The stories go on and on.

Many of us regularly communicate with multiple Twitter and Facebook friends and acquaintances instantaneously even though they may be in another country. Sometimes those friends can be several time zones away. It doesn't seem to matter that much any more where people are located. It's hard to believe that not so long ago, (pre-internet, pre-World Wide Web), this would have been nigh on impossible. We now take it for granted that we can upload and share photos and videos, text chat in real time, see and hear each other, or play games together in the same online social space, across vast distances.

Distance does not seem to be an issue any more, and research is unearthing evidence for what was already common knowledge. A recent study from the University of Illinois reports on the use of the tweets sent by 70 million Twitter users found that on average, tweets and retweets were sent by people located more than 750 miles away from the message originators. This study, published in open access online journal First Monday is intriguingly titled: Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter. Here is the abstract:

In just under seven years, Twitter has grown to count nearly three percent of the entire global population among its active users who have sent more than 170 billion 140–character messages. Today the service plays such a significant role in American culture that the Library of Congress has assembled a permanent archive of the site back to its first tweet, updated daily. With its open API, Twitter has become one of the most popular data sources for social research, yet the majority of the literature has focused on it as a text or network graph source, with only limited efforts to date focusing exclusively on the geography of Twitter, assessing the various sources of geographic information on the service and their accuracy. More than three percent of all tweets are found to have native location information available, while a naive geocoder based on a simple major cities gazetteer and relying on the user–provided Location and Profile fields is able to geolocate more than a third of all tweets with high accuracy when measured against the GPS–based baseline. Geographic proximity is found to play a minimal role both in who users communicate with and what they communicate about, providing evidence that social media is shifting the communicative landscape.

One of the key findings of the research is that Twitter is transforming our conceptions of communication at a global level. The study also confirms at least two other things: Not only are we now a virtual, distributed society, we are also increasingly comfortable with the fact that content, especially knowledge, can be disseminated around the world, via huge networks of users, in seconds. I suspect that the 'ripple effect', where content is spread and amplified through sub-groups across networks, is only just beginning to gather pace and will continue to exponentially grow as more and more people start social media accounts, and then begin to connect with others across the globe.  What this will do for massive online courses and other forms of distance education remains to be seen.

Photo by Artemis Crow


Twitter and the death of distance by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.