How Twitter Is Like Freshman Year in College

[fblike layout_style='button_count' show_faces='false' verb='like' font='segoe ui' color_scheme='light']Ah with fond (and hazy) memories do I recall freshman year at college. A whole new city to explore, hundreds if not thousands of new people to meet, class schedules to manipulate in order to sleep as late as possible. It occurred to me recently that Twitter is actually a lot like your freshman year in college. One of the great things about heading off to college is the opportunity to meet so many new people. And the thing is you don’t meet everyone all at once. In fact, I continued to meet people throughout my freshman and even sophomore years.

Constantly Meeting Your NEW Best Friends

Interacting on Twitter is basically the exact equivalent of Freshman year. Think about it: you are constantly meeting new people, finding the communities you are interested in being a part of, introducing yourself to any number of people. One of the things I remember most clearly about freshman year was how often I had to introduce myself. Even towards the end of the year, having been at school for 8 or 9 months, I’d still come across someone that I had yet to meet. This is one of the pleasures of being in a place with so many people around you.

How many introductions did you make freshman year? How many times did you deliver your life story?

By then end of freshman year I had my schtick down cold. Going to a school in the heart of the Deep South, people would find out I was from New York and instantly be mesmerized. They wanted to know! Everything. What’s it like in New York? Was growing up their fun? Was it dangerous? What about the museums and the Broadway shows? The restaurants and the shopping?

Don’t you have the same experience on Twitter? Someone finds your tweets or your blog posts and introduces themselves, wanting to find out more. Maybe something you wrote, or a link you sent out, or a conversation you were involved with registered with them. Struck the appropriate chord and BAM, just like that, you’ve made a new worthwhile connection.

Figuring Out The Clans and Tribes

Twitter is a big beast of a service. Over a billion tweets sent, 50 million users, and 5 million active users. What this means is that you could spend inordinate amount of times on Twitter and never discover everyone you needed or wanted to, no matter your purpose. It is obvious but its important to remember that Twitter is a social network, and if you look at it this way, you can easily see how college itself is a bit like a social network. A bunch of people of varied backgrounds and interests all dropped into a pool together.

And just like in college, tribes and clans soon form. Human beings are immensely tribal. There are the frat guys and sorority girls who immediately cling to one another and begin to form social hierarchies. The studio artists and theater majors go in one direction, the history nerds join up, the poets head off to the English department and the hippies organize extensive drug trafficking and tape trading syndicates.

Just like with Twitter we only follow so many people. And they follow others. So occasionally we see people we don’t quite know or follow in our streams as someone we DO know interacts with them. Although its a futile task, we tend to construct maps or architectural diagrams of all our connections. Is this any different than how we behaved in college? As we continued to meet people, we placed them in our brackets and connected them to others we knew. Did we meet them at a party off campus, or in a live chat on Twitter? Were we following the same hashtag?

College Is Where We Go To Discover Ourselves

It may be a cliche, and it may not even be true, but for better or worse, college is for many people the place they first begin to discover who they really are, who they spend their time with, how they spend it. Before college, we are too busy dealing with teenage angst, hormones, and the limited size of our high schools to actually discover what we expect out of life, and how we are planning on going about getting it.

Twitter is similarly a place where we discover ourselves, where our real interests lie, who our friends and connections are, what we share, what we keep private. There is something so simple and elegant about Twitter, the limited bursts of thought, the opportunities to both mask and fully expose yourself.

In the end, Twitter forces the real person to emerge. I think that is the great and often overlooked power of Twitter. We celebrate its ability to precipitate conversation and interaction. We find the information we want and need. We find audiences for our products or content. But what about what Twitter does to the self?

Well…thats a topic for another post, but for know, go do a keg stand or something.

Image courtesy of Kenneth Hynek on Flickr