I have been working on some material on group microblogging to add to my participatory web for learning site. I have been developing some content describing educational uses of Twitter and have been thinking about how people seem to react to Twitter. I am easily distracted and instead of finishing the material on Twitter, I decided to develop a developmental stage theory of Twitter users.
I discuss developmental stage theories in my work as a psychologist and while a little bit of a stretch perhaps some of the assumptions of stage theories apply to Twitter users. A major assumption proposes that not all individuals go through all stages and not at the same speed, but all individuals go through stages in the same order.
I do not know if the following diagram is self-explanatory or not, but it proposes three stages, it outlines the the realizations that allow some users to progress to the next stage, and the perspectives that encourages others to quit the Twitter community all together.
So, I welcome you to test this model against your own experiences. If you have tried Twitter, which stage did you achieve?
BTW – the need a better tool links should probably be differentiated – I need a better tool vs. We need a better tool
P.S. – I noticed something interesting after I added this post to my blog. When you examine any single post on this blog, a plugin I have added to WordPress identifies what “it” thinks are similar posts I have generated on the same topic. In the case of this post, it generates earlier posts on Twitter. You can kind of see my own attitude change as I collect experiences with Twitter. Cool.
