How Twitter is like, helping us understand it all..

Nothing I love more than a story saying that something I like doing is good for the world. No-one has yet said that about eating salt and vinegar crisps – yet- but the New Scientist have just said it about Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are, like, helping us “divine the underlying laws of human behaviour” according to the esteemed science magazine.

Well, I do like to help.

It’s not that people are doing anything on Twitter or Facebook that they haven’t done for millenia: talking about the news, cooing over babies, saying what they had for breakfast, it’s just that on the internet all these little comments and behaviours leave a trace that can be analysed. The traces can be use to judge macro patterns about how people behave to each other.

And should we be worried about baddies using that info for evils? Nah, the NS reckons that we already get tracked and surveyed so much that being a little more watched won’t make any difference.

So go, on tweet, you’re helping humanity understand itself.