http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html
Twitter. It's a newly popularized website which allows its followers to recieve short, up-to-date, blurbs about your life. It could be used for social purposes, for business or political purposes, for sports updates; it can pretty much be used for whatever you want. But is Twitter just another website like Facebook and Myspace? Is it just another tool for computer-savvy Americans to use to further separate themselves from the real, material world and emerse themselves in the technological world of electronic communication? Is it really that much harder to go next door and tell your friend "I am feeling sad" than it is to put it on Twitter? Or on your Facebook status? Or is it that we just want to whole WORLD to know how we feel? If we run next doors, no one else will know how we feel, except those we tell. But if we post our feelings, our pictures, our hobbies, our day-to-day updates online, in the electronic world, then everyone knows. Is all this just a way for everyone to get to know everyone else better?
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Twitter is awesome. I've fully embraced it as another means of social networking. You can follow celebrities and athletes and politicians and important honchos and a lot of the times they'll communicate directly with you. It's a really neat facility that's also changing the way we get news. Actual classes are being taught in college on how to write news for Twitter; one of those professors who teaches such a class is coming to Lehigh in the fall, and I'm really excited to see what he has to bring. It's all part of the new model of journalism, which is definitely something we should welcome.
ReplyDeleteI cant decide how I feel about it. I have looked at a few of the celeb pages. I think on Twitter your max character count for one post is 150 characters. So all in all, it really is about quick updating, rather than the back-in-the-day livejournal where people posted detailed narratives. I mean it is cool in a way where you can just insert any celebs name after the backslash and there will most likely be a twitter page for him or her. I think the easy access to anyone is what makes this unique, but im still on the fence.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little conflicted about it too. I like it because I get to read thoughts from my favorite celebrities, but I also think it's annoying because it's basically like a entire site of facebook statuses, and I hate it when people are constantly updated their status with information that I don't really care about. Like I don't care what your schedule is for the entire day or what you are eating right now. I guess it could lead to a lot of new ways of communication, like Andrew said. Especially since nowadays we want our info fast, without having to look through a lot material.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with the conflicted feeling about Twitter. I feel awkward most times posting my "status" on Facebook, so I'm finding it difficult to embrace updating (or joining for that matter) a site that people update by the minute to tell the public exactly where they are and what they're doing. Besides the whole creepy aspect, I think its a little self centered!
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