- meformer
- n.A social network user who posts updates that mostly deal with the user's activities, thoughts, and feelings. [Cf. informer.]Example Citations:Love tweeting about your social life and crave the opportunity to share your thoughts, feelings and emotions? Then you're a meformer. But if you prefer posting links to news websites, love interacting with friends and have a cult following you're an informer.—Amelia Harris, "Tweeting is just all about me," Sydney MX, October 21, 2009While the researchers haven't yet looked into the psychology behind the different kinds of messages that Twitter users post, they did find that meformers and informers had a few key differences. Women post more "me now" tweets than men do (45% for women versus 37% for men). Informers generally have more friends in their social networks, with a median of 131 friends they follow and 112 followers, versus the meformers' median of 61 friends and 42 followers.—Marisa Taylor, " What Kind of Twitterer Are You?: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/10/05/what-kind-of-twitterer-are-you/," Digits (Wall Street Journal), October 5, 2009Earliest Citation:The analysis resulted in two clusters, which we labeled "Informers" (20% of users) and — to suggest a new term — "Meformers" (80%). ... [W]hile Meformers typically post messages relating to themselves or their thoughts, Informers post messages that are informational in nature. ... Note that although the Meformers' self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships.—Mor Naaman, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai, " Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/meformermor/publications/NaamanCSCW2010.pdf" (PDF document), Rutgers University, School of Communication and Information, September 29, 2009Notes:This term hasn't yet broken out "into the wild" because so far every media citation has used it in the context of reporting on the original Rutgers study. I was hoping to find at least one "natural" cite that just used the term on its own, but that hasn't happened yet. It's possible that it may never happen, since not all neologisms can survive outside the cocoon of their original contexts, particularly ones, like meformer, that seem a tad forced and lack a certain, uh, mellifluousness.Related Words: Categories:
New words. 2013.
