I have a Twitter account. For me this is a rather radical statement. Although I have been aware of the microblogging trend, and have even visited different people's, or organisation's, twitter pages, I have never felt a great need to partake in the experience. On top of this I have held reservations about it as a social media tool. Having now set up an account, started following others, and made my first tentative tweets, I have realised that there is a wide gap between the way I previously understood Twitter and the practice of how it can work.
It is certainly satisfying to now understand what all the messages mean that flicker up on the television screen throughout different programs, what it means to have something trending on Twitter and how to decipher all the symbols used. I am learning about the way the # works and how to tag, or speak directly to specific people through the use of an @ symbol. As a new user these different symbols in tweets did appear confusing at first - especially as they contributed to the fact that people who I was not following would come into my news feed because they tagged somebody I was following. They also seemed to eat into the tweet and make it look like there was not a lot of substance to the information given. Sometimes this was the case, other times it was due to an interesting link being given that you just needed to delve into more. It seems that Twitter is often good at highlighting and directing people to information, rather than giving it to you all at once.
There are also a lot more organisations on Twitter than I realised. I have been having an interesting time looking up different groups to follow - from the Guardian to The Melbourne Writers Festival to the US National Archives. Now that I follow over 55 groups/people, the quantity of tweets which come up on my feed when I log on is vast. I didn't realise how frequently organisations are now using Twitter as a tool for sending updates. I am certainly learning from practical experience how Twitter promotes an extremely interconnected world.
In this respect I think it is a valuable tool for Information Management, although the quantity of data that is produces makes it both easy and hard to stay up-to-date at the same time. I was emailed in the morning today about different tweets trending on Twitter to look at and by the time I had logged on a little later, those posts were already eclipsed by other tweets, some of which were just noise that I needed to sift through, and some of which were interesting to look at. The spread of information on Twitter therefore seems to require a continuous input by people producing tweets and a continuous presence by people checking what is happening. When this is the case, I can understand how it becomes a fast tool for spreading information, how different trends can become so widespread so quickly, and how organisations can use it to keep patrons/clients informed. I can also understand how if you don't check all the time, you can miss important things, despite the way that people retweet tweets.
It is certainly satisfying to now understand what all the messages mean that flicker up on the television screen throughout different programs, what it means to have something trending on Twitter and how to decipher all the symbols used. I am learning about the way the # works and how to tag, or speak directly to specific people through the use of an @ symbol. As a new user these different symbols in tweets did appear confusing at first - especially as they contributed to the fact that people who I was not following would come into my news feed because they tagged somebody I was following. They also seemed to eat into the tweet and make it look like there was not a lot of substance to the information given. Sometimes this was the case, other times it was due to an interesting link being given that you just needed to delve into more. It seems that Twitter is often good at highlighting and directing people to information, rather than giving it to you all at once.
There are also a lot more organisations on Twitter than I realised. I have been having an interesting time looking up different groups to follow - from the Guardian to The Melbourne Writers Festival to the US National Archives. Now that I follow over 55 groups/people, the quantity of tweets which come up on my feed when I log on is vast. I didn't realise how frequently organisations are now using Twitter as a tool for sending updates. I am certainly learning from practical experience how Twitter promotes an extremely interconnected world.
In this respect I think it is a valuable tool for Information Management, although the quantity of data that is produces makes it both easy and hard to stay up-to-date at the same time. I was emailed in the morning today about different tweets trending on Twitter to look at and by the time I had logged on a little later, those posts were already eclipsed by other tweets, some of which were just noise that I needed to sift through, and some of which were interesting to look at. The spread of information on Twitter therefore seems to require a continuous input by people producing tweets and a continuous presence by people checking what is happening. When this is the case, I can understand how it becomes a fast tool for spreading information, how different trends can become so widespread so quickly, and how organisations can use it to keep patrons/clients informed. I can also understand how if you don't check all the time, you can miss important things, despite the way that people retweet tweets.
On a different note, I was a little disconcerted to find that, after only a few hours of being part of the Twitterverse, somehow I had ended up with two very random followers - one of whom was a person whose description included words I do wish to re-write. Is this the pay off of such a universal system? Do you need to be constantly filtering for Spam followers? I went through the different settings and found the one which locks your tweets to private, which means that you get to approve or decline followers. Changing my settings to this created a little lock sign next to my profile, which I did not see on many other accounts that I was following. It made me start to think - is creating a locked account something that defies what Twitter stands for? I started to think about this in relation to something like Yammer, which also offers a microblogging platform, but which operates in a different manner, enabling specific groups to create closed platforms that they can use to communicate (I can really see the value of this within an organisation to help everybody stay informed about what others are doing). I always thought of Twitter as something slightly different - a global ongoing conversation that people flickered in and out of. A locked account does create a barrier for this to occur - so maybe I should go back to the 'full experience' of Twitter and unlock my account? I would be interested in what other people think about this question.
Hi Elizabeth,
ReplyDeletePersonally I have never seen Twitter as something you make private. I see the likes of Facebook as a way to keep in contact with your friends in a private/protected setting where Twitter is more of a networking platform on which you can contact people you may not know (in a polite not rude manner). I guess if everyone made their accounts protected then we would not be able to see what interesting tweets other people have tweeted or who is using the same hashtags as us.
That being said I can also see why it would be a good idea to make a Twitter account protected. It would allow you to block people who you don’t want following you. There is so much trouble with people trolling and trying to access your information that deciding who follows you and who doesn’t can be a good thing. It really is a trade-off between networking and privacy isn’t it.
Hi Katherine,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. I agree with you that there is a difficult line between networking and privacy with social media, especially with Twitter. While using Twitter over the past week, however, I have realised that you do tend to be more a spectator if you have a privacy setting than actually part of the action. Consequently, for this project, I have changed my tweets back to public and will keep an eye on what happens!