On Twitter and Machiavellian Intelligence

Four short months and 135 tweets ago I wrote about joining Twitter. Slightly reluctant, confused by how it worked and - if I'm completely honest - a bit sniffy about whether I could be bothered with it at all.

But just a week ago I stunned myself by realising that Twitter is now the first thing I check in the morning. Not email. After the best part of 15 years of first ritually checking my email Twitter has knocked email off the top spot(1). So what happened? What is it about Twitter that is so compelling, so addictive? Why do I love Twitter?

Actually that was just the first surprise. The second was to realise I was so pleased when my number of followers reached 50, then 60 - and last week 70.

But the thing that shocked me rigid a week ago was this. I found myself wondering how I might contrive person X (who I admired) to notice me and become my follower. What the hell was I thinking! Who's in control here - me or Twitter; do I have obsessive compulsive twitter syndrome? Do I need help - maybe go cold turkey for awhile?

But then I started thinking about it and realised that there is a very ancient instinct at work here, and Twitter is just tickling that instinct in me. Perfectly. I'm talking about Machiavellian intelligence. The kind of social intelligence that is present to some degree in all primates and well developed in Chimpanzee and monkeys such as Rhesus Macaques. So what is this kind of social intelligence? Well, if you find yourself thinking: I'm going to make friends with him and pretend I like him, but not because I want to be his friend. Oh no: he has a friend that I really want to be friends with and - through this deception - I might achieve that goal. Then you are engaged in the social politics of Machiavellian intelligence. For anyone interested in intelligence, the evolution of human intelligence, or indeed AI, Machiavellian intelligence is very interesting because it requires Theory of Mind. It was probably already well developed in the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzee, around 6 million years ago.

I don't know whether it was intentional, but the very smart people who created Twitter have somehow built an ecosystem perfectly suited for this kind of game. The basic ingredients are these: firstly everyone has followers and people they follow (following). The fact that you can easily see the number of followers and following for those you follow, or who follow you, means that very quickly you establish exactly where you are in the Twitter social pecking order. These numbers mean alot to us. The alpha-tweeters are those with huge numbers of followers. They are, in the terminology of memetics, meme-founts - leaders of fashion. But even for those of us with modest circles of followers and following, the balance of numbers is significant. Our Machiavellian instinct tells us that those with a greater number of followers than following are, on balance, leaders whereas those whose following outnumbers their followers are, on balance, followers and therefore of lower Twitter status. Please understand I'm absolutely not saying they are less worthy individuals, only that this is what our Machiavellian instinct tells us in the game of Twitter.

The second ingredient that is, I think, significant is the fact that you can easily see which followers or following you have in common with someone. So it is not just a matter of numbers, it's personal. Among those you follow, and those who follow you, you really can work out very quickly who is connected to who - and the connections have social structure. If I and someone else follow each other, then we are - in a sense - equal. If, on the other hand, I see that I'm following someone else, but they don't follow me, then my Machiavellian instinct places them higher up the Twitter social scale than me. Again this may not correlate at all to real-life standing. The point I'm making is that we can't help making these Machiavellian inferences - and Twitter makes it so easy.

This brings me to the third and most brilliant ingredient: Re-tweeting. The politics of re-tweeting are fascinating and complex. Having one of your tweets re-tweeted is the equivalent of being stroked, and we love being stroked. I certainly experience a quantum of happiness(2) when one of my tweets is re-tweeted, and I'm even happier if it's re-tweeted several times. Conversely, I'm disappointed if a tweet that I thought was especially witty, insightful or apposite to current events fails to be re-tweeted. Indeed it appears to be good manners to thank those who have RT'd a tweet - which says alot of how much we value RTs. And of course to be re-tweeted by a Twitter celebrity is a precious honour, the equivalent of a favour by one of the princesses of the Twitter court.

So Twitter is powerful stuff. It's not just a micro-blogging site, it is a quite remarkable place in which we can play out to the full our ancient instinct for Machiavellian social politics.

And of course Twitter has proven itself to be a marvellous vehicle for grass-roots political activism. Is that something to do with Machiavellian intelligence too?

So now I don't feel quite so bad about my new-found Twitter addiction.

---

(1) Apart from a short spell of Guardian Soulmates 3 years ago:))
(2) I propose a new unit for a quantum of happiness: the RT (re-tweet).

Twitter

Well, I can't believe I'm on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alan_winfield

Not at all sure I understand what I'm doing yet. There' some puzzling terminology to learn - what's retweeting for instance..? (It sounds like a word from The Meaning of Liff.)

The reason I joined is because I wanted to respond to the questions on @scienceexchange. The first question is

Given the rate of discovery of exo-planets - is there still any doubt that we are not alone in the universe?

And my twittered answer:

Depends: life maybe a little more probable; intelligent life still highly improbable, see Drake's equation

I like the challenge of trying to construct a useful answer in 140 characters.

Blogging the Robot Bloggers

Here at @Bristol Walking with Robots is running a 3-day workshop for students and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence and animatronics. It's a kind of masterclass whose objective is to train those students and researchers in science communication, with the hope that they'll be motivated to get involved in public engagement. I'm not going to talk about the training workshop here because it's described elsewhere in both a recent UWE press release Making Science Fun for Everyone and on EPSRC grants on the web here.

What I want to blog about here are the robot bloggers on wwrobots.wordpress.com.

The workshop has four streams with about a quarter of the students signing up for each. One of those streams is New Media, which is training its group in online reporting. Here is picture of the online newsroom.

These students have been tasked with publishing stories from the other three groups. Remarkably, the blog was up and running by mid-morning Monday and has provided a more-or-less real-time record of the workshop since then. The newsroom has been busy the whole time, but never more so than right now. This afternoon the whole workshop has had an amazing opportunity to put their activities to the test on the floor of @Bristol, and since this is the half-term holidays it's pretty busy out there (to put it mildly). Our robot bloggers have been out on the floor too, recording with still photos, video and text, the extraordinary excitement of the interaction between our students, their robotics, AI and animatronics activities, and the children and families. Scroll down wwrobots and you'll quickly get a sense of that excitement.

Of course I'm focussing on just one aspect of the workshop but it was, for me, perhaps the most surprising. Firstly, by opening my eyes to the potential for Web 2.0 media to provide - in effect - real time interactive reporting; a kind of worldwide outside broadcast. It seems to me that, with this approach, there is remarkable potential to enhance and extend the reach of many kinds of public engagement or science communication.

But secondly and even more significantly here, our robot bloggers bound together the whole workshop in an altogether unexpected and enriching way.

On blogging

Gosh this is interesting. Although an internet user since before there was an Internet*, I am completely new to blogging; a newbie blogger in fact - is there a word for that?

So, why now blogging..? A number of reasons I guess.

First, a bit of vanity I suppose. I guess you have to be just a little bit vain to suppose that anyone else might read, or indeed be the slightest bit interested in your musings.

Second, as an academic and professional communicator, and someone who believes very strongly that ideas should be freely exchanged and communicated, I am interested in blogging as a medium for just that.

Thirdly, because I think the internet is changing human culture in some deep and surprising ways. The internet is becoming a new kind of dynamic collective memory, allowing us to offload (or upload, to be more accurate) stuff that we used to either have to remember or carry around with us. A small thing, perhaps, but have you noticed that business cards have become pretty much obsolete (at least in academia): people say "just google me". Wired telephones also, I think the one in my office doesn't get used more that once a week now; made more or less obsolete by email (and therein lies another blog entry!). Dictionaries, encyclopedias, libraries all going the same way (but not books, interestingly). Even CDs. As I write this I am listening to internet radio (bach-radio.com), being sucked wirelessly from my broadband connection and played on my HiFi by an amazing Philips Streamium. It's weeks since I played a CD! But it's more than these things: the way that we work, play and interact has changed profoundly. For the better? Well, maybe - that's a moot point. So, this is a rather long winded way of saying that blogging is, I think, a very interesting part of that change.

A final thought. Writing this feels strangely different to publishing web pages (which I've been doing since the web was invented). It feels much more personal, a kind of message in a virtual bottle. So, here it is, my first message cast out onto the ocean of the internet. Who knows where it will wash ashore.


*I recall sending emails to Caltech in c.1994 when you had to explicitly address the gateway between JANET and the ARPANET. It was quite a feat! I also built my research lab's first web server and hand coded the lab's first web pages sometime in 1996. The amazing wayback machine doesn't quite go way back enough - but here is it's earliest recorded IAS lab web page from April 1997.