Please don't take any of this as criticism. I'm just exploring your idea out loud. I'm genuinely trying to be constructive.
Twitter is probably coursed. Elon Musk is now linked to Trump. People are moving off the platform to things like BlueSky and Mastodon. Your scope of the W.E.I.R.D. people has possibly changed.
I also wonder what it means "to predict culture" on a social network. I define culture to mean "the things that we do."
Typically, there are two categories of users: producers and consumers.
The producers are usually going to be people looking for engagement for their business. It might be people posting interesting things that they find. Or it's people shitposting. What percentage of users producing on Twitter is a person just trying to express themselves versus trying to be a persona?
So when we measure culture (the way we behave), are we measuring what humans really do or are you measuring how they interact with this tool?
And if you discover interesting behaviours on Twitter, is that a real reflection of how humans behave offline?
extremely important feedback, thank you for bringing this up! This has been bothering me too. My friend keeps telling me, "how do you know any of this is true/isn't just a weird cultural bubble"
I think the answer is we can't draw such general conclusions. Ok, so we claw back the scope, what CAN we do with this data? I go back to what got me interested in this in the first place. I didn't grow up in the US, and I had a strained relationship with my father in-law, we couldn't really talk about much. After studying a specific category people on twitter, I went back and suddenly I felt like I understood him, we had a lot to talk about, I could like "decode" his language. I understood what he valued, what he feared, his relationship to the world.
I think that's the point, there is no one homogeneous human culture, there's lots of tribes. What I care about most is finding where the tribes are, giving tools to those who want to spread their ideas, so that we can find each other. The end game is that if you want to know what tribe X thinks, you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, they have spaces where you can read their discourse, or just ask them.
Another way I think of this is like, the way scientists talk to the public is very different than the way scientists talk to each other. I get a lot more depth of understanding about what is cutting edge, what is controversial, and what is consensus listening to people in the field talk to each other as peers (on podcasts or parts of twitter/mastodon/bluesky). I want each tribe here to have tools to map their own discourse, because it helps them, and it helps the wider world, helps other tribes get a clear picture of who they are, that isn't distorted by "those people are the enemy/those people are weird"
A tool you might appreciate is Erin Meyer's Culture Map. She's got 8 axes:
- Communicating: low-context vs high-context
- Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs indirect negative feedback
- Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first
- Leading: egalitarian vs hierarchical
- Deciding: consensual vs top-down
- Trusting: task-based vs relationship-based
- Disagreeing: confrontational vs avoids confrontation
- Scheduling: linear-time vs flexible-time
And at a complete tangent since we're discussing culture., I've really been enjoying Culture Critic's work. They've been analysing classic works (art and philosophy) and using it to explain modern life.
Please don't take any of this as criticism. I'm just exploring your idea out loud. I'm genuinely trying to be constructive.
Twitter is probably coursed. Elon Musk is now linked to Trump. People are moving off the platform to things like BlueSky and Mastodon. Your scope of the W.E.I.R.D. people has possibly changed.
I also wonder what it means "to predict culture" on a social network. I define culture to mean "the things that we do."
Typically, there are two categories of users: producers and consumers.
The producers are usually going to be people looking for engagement for their business. It might be people posting interesting things that they find. Or it's people shitposting. What percentage of users producing on Twitter is a person just trying to express themselves versus trying to be a persona?
So when we measure culture (the way we behave), are we measuring what humans really do or are you measuring how they interact with this tool?
And if you discover interesting behaviours on Twitter, is that a real reflection of how humans behave offline?
Maybe I'm worrying about the wrong thing.
extremely important feedback, thank you for bringing this up! This has been bothering me too. My friend keeps telling me, "how do you know any of this is true/isn't just a weird cultural bubble"
I think the answer is we can't draw such general conclusions. Ok, so we claw back the scope, what CAN we do with this data? I go back to what got me interested in this in the first place. I didn't grow up in the US, and I had a strained relationship with my father in-law, we couldn't really talk about much. After studying a specific category people on twitter, I went back and suddenly I felt like I understood him, we had a lot to talk about, I could like "decode" his language. I understood what he valued, what he feared, his relationship to the world.
I think that's the point, there is no one homogeneous human culture, there's lots of tribes. What I care about most is finding where the tribes are, giving tools to those who want to spread their ideas, so that we can find each other. The end game is that if you want to know what tribe X thinks, you don't need to take anyone else's word for it, they have spaces where you can read their discourse, or just ask them.
Another way I think of this is like, the way scientists talk to the public is very different than the way scientists talk to each other. I get a lot more depth of understanding about what is cutting edge, what is controversial, and what is consensus listening to people in the field talk to each other as peers (on podcasts or parts of twitter/mastodon/bluesky). I want each tribe here to have tools to map their own discourse, because it helps them, and it helps the wider world, helps other tribes get a clear picture of who they are, that isn't distorted by "those people are the enemy/those people are weird"
A tool you might appreciate is Erin Meyer's Culture Map. She's got 8 axes:
- Communicating: low-context vs high-context
- Evaluating: direct negative feedback vs indirect negative feedback
- Persuading: principles-first vs applications-first
- Leading: egalitarian vs hierarchical
- Deciding: consensual vs top-down
- Trusting: task-based vs relationship-based
- Disagreeing: confrontational vs avoids confrontation
- Scheduling: linear-time vs flexible-time
And at a complete tangent since we're discussing culture., I've really been enjoying Culture Critic's work. They've been analysing classic works (art and philosophy) and using it to explain modern life.
wasn't aware of Culture Critic, just subscribed to them, looks amazing, thank you!!