Votes, taxis and Twitter

The other day we met up with some friends to follow the elections. In the end there were two or three thousand of us. We often do it. We also get together for the Eurovision Song Contest, the opening ceremony of the Olympics, when Barça plays and the presentation of TV3's theatre season. We are friends, relatives, acquaintances and bots from all over the place. I don't think I've left anyone out.

Unlike the Eurovision or the Olympics, for which we play for points, electoral nights are more emotional because then we play for cash. Numbers, cheese wedges, percentages, projections, bar graphs, seats and the Sims Parlament appeared on the telly while the radio provided a soundtrack.

Twitter, however, was the place for politically correct and interesting opinions, the reactions of the candidates and the reactions to the reactions of the voters, cat videos and selfies of in-laws, the celebration of results and candidates more or less at a disadvantage. If that isn't a festival of democracy, I don't know what is.

The manuals say that Twitter is a means of communication somewhere between a personal message system and teletype, but I have always preferred to see it as a radio station in a taxi. Let me explain. The taxi driver moves around the city, listening to the radio and talking to the customer, while he or she has one ear on the receiver on which conversations of colleagues is mixed in with messages from headquarters. He only becomes involved in the conversation from time to time, to acknowledge a fare or arranging to meet a colleague.

At all times and without the need to refer to it explicitly, the taxi driver has a mental map of where his colleagues are, of the addresses they are going to, who is on their way to the airport or who has stopped at one bar or another. Remind you of anything?

Well, it seems that without knowing it, we have more in common with taxi drivers than we realise. Since the day we opened a Twitter account, we have spent a lot of time listening to our own receivers, intervening in conversations when appropriate, connecting with whoever shares our interests, and without any permanent contact we know what people are up to, where they are and whether they are on their way to the airport or not.

Before Twitter it was very easy to classify the media: press, radio, TV and cinema, which work well at generating opinion and creating groups around them. While on the other hand, messaging and telephoning worked on an interpersonal level. The media, which are very efficient for organising groups, are not so useful for interpersonal communication, or the other way around.

Twitter's strange capacity to excel in interpersonal communication, as well as in the creation of groups around ideas makes me think that perhaps on the night of #27s we were on Twitter because there were elections but also that there were elections because we are on Twitter.