What’s in a status?

What is a status update? What are they for? How has the ubiquitous prompt for status updating changed the way we think about ourselves as messengers in an ever more diffuse network?

The first important thing to note is that status updates have evolved out of instant messaging. This might be obvious to some, but for those who find it puzzling, please see Jennifer van Groven’s article about the history of the status message. The status evolved from being a simple signal of presence, like opening your eyes would be a signal of your being awake, to a more complex message like the kind you would put on your doorknob in a hotel room to notify room service of your wishes. What this fact can teach us is that originally, the status message was aimed at a defined group of recipients. So if for instance your AOL Messenger was set to „busy”, „away”, or adorned with a custom message like „cooking my mother-in-law’s socks”, this was insofar still a „message” as it was directed at those users who a) were listed as your contacts and b) were online to see the message.

Today, the status update is called so because it can no longer be seen as a „message”. Messages imply defined recipients. Although you may see your group of 500+ facebook friends as „defined recipients”, the truth is you are no longer taking into account every one of them as you are typing your status update. So, who are you thinking about? In all probability, you are sending this message to an undisclosed recipient, no longer thinking in terms of „for whom” but more „for what”. In other words, the impulse in composing your status is more content-driven than receiver-oriented. The function that your message will fill is not therefore so much informative nor conative as it is expressive.

In recent months, both twitter and facebook have changed their status questions – that is the phrase which prompts you to fill in the blank space which becomes your status message, visible to all (twitter) your friends (facebook). The traditional facebook question (in English) was „What are you doing right now?” and has become „What’s on your mind?” in March 2009, while the original twitter question was „What are you doing?” and changed to „What’s happening?” in November 2009. Let’s take a closer look at this double shift:

• What are you doing right now? → What’s on your mind?
• What are you doing? → What’s happening?

Here is what Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin had to say about the new question:

“It’s going to be more about the message you want to send to others than what you’re doing at that very moment”.

The facebook trend is switching from lifecasting to mind-casting (those unfamiliar with these pretty self-evident terms are referred to Jay Rosen’s work), which is pretty self-explanatory. It is generally more interesting to learn what you are thinking than what you are doing, since thoughts are shareware, whereas that tuna sandwich you just had will be yours forever. Lifecasting would make sense if we were aware of all the recipients. Informing them of our context (referential function) or establishing communication lines with them by saying whether we are available or not (phatic function) become useless when faced with a myriad of nameless potential recipients, which is what your facebook friends become if you have more than 100 or so.

It is interesting to note that the prompts are not exactly prompting your mind to „cast” the same thing in the different language versions. For instance, the Canadian French Facebook will ask you „What are you thinking?” while the French French will encourage you to „Express yourself”.

The twitter trend has taken it even further.  The official Twitter blog states that the change is simply a response to user practice: the trend has been picked up from the bottom (see the RT function or # usage). A very revealing comment by Biz Stone shows the delicate intricacies of this bottom-up trend-setting story:

„it seemed like only a small part of the twitter updates were actually answering the “What are you doing?” question, which are of the more personal, less newsworthy variety: “(…) a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.”

Even if some users on twitter were in effect using it as a micro-news/alert system, it is quite possible that Biz Stone himself played a part in the trend-setting by putting a name on what he strived to encourage: a “newsworthy” variety of tweets, making Twitter your real-time Google. Stone adds that

„The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.”

To sum up, twitter has gone beyond the idea of mindcasting, and into something more like awareness-casting. What this means is status updates are going to be less and less about what you think, believe, feel, at a given moment (emotive, expressive functions) and more and more about what your alert, perceptive reason has noticed, that is worth sharing with the world. Strangely enough, all updates are potentially of the same value since we are all liable to notice/discover/witness something equally noteworthy, wherever we may be. It could be argued that twitter willingly chose this kind of trend at its outset, by 1) limiting the length of updates to 140 characters and 2) making all your tweets visible by default to anyone.

To some, status updates have evolved from simple inward-based signals like “I’m here” or “I’m busy”, to informative statements with limited objective value like “I’m sick of being tired.”, to mindcasting and finally to outward-based signals like “Girl shot in Tehran”. They call this a new era of „citizen journalism”. It doesn’t take much to notice, however, that 1) mindcasting in itself is not worthless, and 2) journalism entails much more than can fit into 140 characters. At best, the new trend twitter’s masterminds are trying to „pick up” is transforming the status update into a dynamic, organic wire which will make us aware of more than we could possibly be if we were in touch with all noteworthy events happening NOW.

References:
1.     Jennifer van Groven (Mashable)
2.    Jay Rosen (NYU)
3.    For comic yet topical relief, see The Oatmeal.