Not having a twitter myself, I felt this would be
the perfect opportunity to look at different perspectives of the popular social
media site. There were many articles
that spoke of twitter as a chatter of people which is not the kind of twitter I
was looking for. One of the earliest
mentions of twitter referring to the popular social media site I found while
searching Proquest, Project Muse and JStor was from May 2007, roughly a year
after Twitter launched. The article
spoke of how Twitter could be used as an educational advantage. Instead of using full length blogs, Twitter
involves “microblogs” that can give live up to date information of activities
students are doing. The article said
Twitter will help to create a learning community on the internet between people
posting many different information comments that could help to change the
dynamic of the classroom. The article
thought Twitter would be a way to bring classrooms from all across the country,
and even the globe, together to help students become interested in what they
are learning. They would also be able to
talk with students elsewhere and create a connection to help the learning process
become even stronger with a tight-knit online community. This idea behind Twitter is quite admirable;
however it is not how everyone first felt about the popular site.
When
searching The New York Times, The Chicago
Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, I
found an article roughly around the same time, May 2007, which said Twitter was
a site mainly for people connecting with other people about what they were
currently doing, purely a socializing tool.
Critics ridiculed this idea and questioned whether we needed such a
thing to distract us from our in person interactions. The concerns of the critics did not have much
effect on people though, as the article states, in 2007, Twitter was named the “best
on the web” at a multimedia and music festival in Austin.
Twitter was quickly becoming a popular way for people to connect.
Today
Twitter is used for both of the activities the old articles mentioned as well
as countless more. It is widely used as
a way to get information out to people in this digital generation as nearly
every major group that has a following says to follow it on Twitter for
updates. Twitter is being used today as
it was intended to be used, a tool used to connect a lot of different
people in different places with the same information in a quick and easy
fashion. The concerns of the critics
though, seem to have been realized. Many
people are often concerned with what is going on elsewhere than what is going
on around them. Twitter, a tool of the
digital age, has taken away the feeling of being left in the dark but has also
taken away the simplicity of life. Our
patience and concentration has quickly become limited as we learn to adapt to
the flow of information through the constant updating of Twitter.
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