Tommy Collison

Well, it’s the morning after, 9,000 people visited the site yesterday, and we currently have 62 comments on the Stephen Fry post. I must say, I am surprised by the reaction.

I am quite surprised by the amount of negative comments. I mean, let’s just go over exactly what happened: I DM Stephen Fry asking him to tweet a question so I can monitor the response. He does so, and I get some of the responses from search.twitter.com

This was the main piece of paper I used to record data. 2 debating cards, divided into 4 columns. Every time I saw a tweet in favour of him joining Digg, I put a line in one column. Nothing even electronic about it, I didn’t get involved with Twitter to try and do it like that. (You could argue now that there is a margin of human error. I triple checked the results)

I then put the results into a graph.

That’s what I did, and yet I have people saying that they were ‘used’ and ‘cheated’.

Where do you get that feeling from?

If Fry just happened to tweet something mildly questioning of his own accord (without anyone DMing him) and someone went to search.twitter.com and gathered results, would there be as big an uproar? Did the fact that I was on Twitter and asked him first
change anything? In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a tweet with a question. Fry (and most big tweeters, which is what this is about at the end of the day) get so many responses to any and all of their tweets that I possibly could’ve used a normal tweet.

Next, whatever about being given out to (this is the internet, you need the skin of a rhino), I just don’t comprehend people who give out about something, that if they’d read the tweet clearly, could have been avoided.

Erm, he did genuinely want to know, and he said that in his original tweet about the study:

[...] I did genuinely want to know [...]

Finally, I don’t know which caused more uproar, people thinking they were being ‘used’ or people against my publishing of the ‘idolizing’ tweet. In my Fry post, I said how one of the tweets really hit it home for me just how much people love this guy, so I screen-shotted the tweet (CMD+SHIFT+4 if you’re on a Mac) and uploaded that picture to Flickr. It was a public tweet viewable to anyone and everyone who came along. It wasn’t a private account either, I wasn’t even following them, so literally everyone (not even just people on Twitter) could see it.

Emily commented twice about it in my previous post, acknowledging that the internet was a public place, but saying I shouldn’t have commented about the person ‘behind her back’. Emily’s comments have been the best so far of people against what I did, and even if I disagree with her point, I appeciate the fact she put out a clear, coherent argument.

It’s not like by posting a picture of her tweet I’m in some way putting her on show for us to laugh at. If you look at the post, I don’t say anything about it past the fact I found it startling, and guessing that the woman idolized Fry.

I don’t think the fact that I brought up the ‘monkey see Fry doing something, monkey do what Fry does’ point is what people disliked either, it was the fact I refered to people as ‘sheep’. By sheep, I only meant that people joined Digg purely because Fry did it. If you think about it, how much of what we eat/wear/do is purely because we see famous people do so? I know I only started wearing converse because Richard Hammond did in an episode of Top Gear…

My overall conclusion is that I didn’t do anything dishonest in my study. There were three main problems identified, but I stand by my points.