There’s a really interesting iPhone twitter application called Twinkle. It covers the usual bases of allowing you to update your status and receive status updates from your friends, but also it does one more thing; It displays tweets from people who are near you, not just your friends. I found out about this via Kottke, who wrote a short post about the random messages he would get from people in manhattan, and mentioned overhearing (over-reading?) people flirting semi-anonymously with each other via twitter messages. 

This is different to the internet where normally you read things which are organized by topic. Predictably, then, you’ll just read the things your interested in: like technology news, or how dreamy Obama is, and ignore the rest. You can often choose location based topics but most often it’s only based on the closest major city. Language is similar, but you don’t even realize that you’re selecting sites based on it, you don’t think “I’m going to read some english sites” like you would think “I’m going to check out the latest political news”.  But “[t]he Internet suggests a new map of the world, with borders redrawn along language lines.” (Virginia Heffernan wrote in an article for the NYTimes). I would argue that whilst language may form the countries in this new map, topics of interest would form the (slightly blurred) states (or provinces, or cantons…).  Twinkle, then, is like someone who comes in and redraws the map, as a circle around you.  

What is the effect of this metaphoric geographic reshuffling? You’ll get messages in your twitter stream that are entirely without context, some of the particularly random ones will remind you that it’s from someone who is only connected to you by their proximity. There’s not much else to think when you get a message like “@linzerschnitte i werds mit single malt angehen, und du?” These messages will be about things you don’t care about, about things you don’t believe in and in languages you don’t understand; Forcing you to engage with the space, people and concepts around you. The messages will break into the personal bubble that the iPod has helped to create.

It also allows for some interesting discoveries. I imagine if you use it for an extended period of time you’ll  start to notice updates from the same users and  start to learn about some them. By looking at what topics are coming up frequently you’ll get a pretty good idea about what people are talking about, and what news is popular or important.  And whilst there is a bias for people with similar points of views to live in similar areas, there will still be a much broader cross section of opinions than what you usually access by just talking to your friends

So twinkle redefines some aspects of the internet topography, is it really that big of a deal, should I be finding it as interesting as I do?

Social psychologists seem to love two types of studies. The ones that either tell us what we already know ‘People like attractive people’ or the ones that tell us the complete opposite of what we thing ‘The more people around, the less likely they are to help’. They like to get down to the nitty gritty of why we do the things we do.

For quite a while many researchers were doing studies like “How long does it take a person to put on or take off their shoes off? Do they do it faster if someone is watching?” (They then compared those times to how long it takes someone to put on and take off huge pink socks with someone watching.)  Basically they found that if you’re pretty good at something, then you’ll do it better if people are around, and conversely you’ll do worse if people are watching you do something you’re poor at.  That seems pretty obvious right? If you’re a billiards master then having a crowd watch you at the bar makes you even better. But if you barely scrape by in pool, you find yourself going from sinking a few balls to no balls, whilst you promise everyone you’re normally not that bad, I swear.

What about Tug-o-war? It’s kinds similar to pool; It’s a physical activity, and there can be people around, pulling alongside you. But in fact the more people there are on your tug-o-team the less the average person pulls (Ringelmann 1913). Of course there could be any number of explanations for this sub par performance. A guy called Alan Ingham set out to prove it more definitively. With his experiment he had people pulling on the rope, blindfolded, and he would tell them they were either pulling by themselves or with others. In reality they were the only person on their team. He found that people pull less when in groups. It wasn’t a huge difference, but still there; They pulled at 90% of their individual capacity if there was one other person and 85% if there were two other people.

So what’s the difference between playing pool and tug-o-war? Well it seems to be all about being able to differentiate each individual’s contribution. with pool people can keep track of each ball you sink, and see when you’re doing your part. With tug-o-war you could be pulling less than everyone else and no one would know. This applies to other areas too, anything where you can’t differentiate an individual’s work. This phenomenon has a fantastic name; Social Loafing.

Why does social loafing occur? There are a few things that can encourage it such as:

• If individual contributions can’t be easily evaluated by other people. No one’s going to know if we pull a little less hard, just as how Ashley the hole digger won’t know that Pat the hole digger shifted a lot less dirt.
• If we feel like our contribution isn’t important. I’m just an individual, what can I do?
• if we feel others are putting in less effort; We ‘match’ how much effort we put in to how much we think others are. Sam wasn’t even breaking a sweat, and here I am straining like a sucker.

How do you minimize social loafing? Just try to get rid of the things that cause it; Make sure that each person’s individual effort is recognized, and that everyone feels like their effort is important. A standard of how much and what type of work is expected can also help. Different groups of people are affected by it differently as well. Collectivist cultures, which emphasize a person’s place in a community rather than as an individual, are less affected by it, as are close knit groups of people, such as friends. No word on if it’s why politicians are so lazy though.