Twitter: Reflections and What I Learned

Prior to this class I had a vague idea of what Twitter was and how it worked, however I had no intentions of ever creating an account. My understanding of Twitter was a follows, the 250 character limit forced people to cut down on what they had to say, so users started to use Twitter more for short blurbs rather than longer thought out sentences. Moreover this would cause people to create shorter ‘thoughts’ typically about things that were happening to them at the time of the tweet. These ‘thoughts’ included people declaring to the world what they had for lunch, complaining, and other menial things that I had no interest in (although I did realize that some people were interested in that type of thing). That being said, I did see the novelty in reading about what some of the more famous people were doing in real time, but that alone was not enough for me to warrant creating and maintaining a Twitter account. After creating and using a Twitter account over the course of this semester, my original thoughts on Twitter and people’s everyday use of it were confirmed. However, this is not say that my view on Twitter and its use was not broadened. As stated above, regular people are not the only users of Twitter; celebrities, content creators, and large companies also use Twitter on a daily basis. Over the course of the semester, I have seen personal statements made from content creators on their own content, supermarket corporations banter over who had the better tomato paste, an AI social experiment spiral out of control, and Kanye West and other ‘celebrities’ overreacting about things. Not to mention countless bits of popular culture that I may or may not have been better without knowing. In other words, I witnessed a great deal of very large scale discourse happening. Simultaneously, Twitter also offers the ability to have variable sized conversations using their ‘hashtag’ feature. Over the past three months, our class’s hashtag provided a way for members of our class to be able to share and distribute information using something that could easily be acquired, while at the same time, so oddly specific that an ‘outsider’ would not be able to get hold of it. Or in other words, we created our own small scale discourse by simply using an eight character long set that could easily grow if we as group so chose to do so. The duality between large scale conversation and a small scale ‘ease of access’ conversation is something that I find interesting. While Facebook can accomplish something similar utilizing its groups and chat system, it is not the same: as groups take time to setup and maintain (which may not be worth it in the case of a very small group) and a chats can get quickly out of hand with a larger group of people. Twitters use of the hashtag fills a very specific niche interest of fulfilling the founder’s requirement of ease of access to a variably sized group, which resonates surprisingly very well with the user end as it also gives him/her the liberty to drop the conversation at his/her pleasure. After a semester of using Twitter I understand why so many people use it as it offers a unique environment in where almost all information and all discourses are readily at the disposal, use, and benefit of a user but are at the same time are secured (almost paradoxally) by nothing but obscurity.