Jennifer Palmer offers up some insights into how Twitter helps us coalesce into on-the-fly 'groupings' as I call them:
Reality Sandwich | Radical Interdependence and Online Telepathy: How Twitter Helps Us Find One Another.Twitter is a great tool for DIY, self-organizing “un-groups” such as the stranded airline passengers mentioned above. As the name would imply, an un-group doesn’t have a membership policy or an explicitly agreed upon set of rules and hierarchies. Un-groups aren’t meant to be solemn brother or sisterhoods that one swears an oath to uphold. They are the practical, quick and easy collaborative attempts to solve any number of problems. What’s more, the specificity of the un-groups makes it such that belonging to one doesn’t define you as a person -- perhaps you work as an executive for Phillip Morris trying to figure out how to sell more cigarettes but also coordinate your neighborhood’s recycling efforts in a city or a town where the municipality refuses to do it.
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