"Tweet" "Tweet" "Tweet"

Matt Larson
Essay 4
DTC 375 Farman
4-1-09
WC 1087

“Tweet” "Tweet" "Tweet"

“Just lost my championship game for city league.” This was the message I just added to my twitter account. Twitter is a micro blogging website where you can put short messages everyday about what your doing at that very moment. You can only put a total of 140 characters in each message or “tweet”. Not only can you “tweet”, but you can follow other members “tweets” as well. These tweets can even be sent directly to your phone via text message so you can make sure you don’t miss an update. Twitter is unlike any other form of communication in the digital age but yet still holds true to its historic background.

Since writing was invented, journals have been a major role in our society. Take the bible for instance, it is many journals of holy men compiled together to help us learn about God and be more like him. It is the moral basis of our culture today. Another example is how many people keep journals about their everyday lives. They write down their thoughts, experiences, and ideas in these journals. It is usually a very private and personal thing. Then in the coming of the digital age, blogging became the next big thing. Blogging is basically keeping a journal on the Internet, however, it is not so private anymore. Twitter, however, allows people to capture an individual’s experience that would otherwise be missed. It takes small snippets of people’s daily lives and makes them important (Kroski, 1). Now people can read them and follow your everyday experiences and thoughts. This brings a new sense of a society, and helps people feel like they are part of a group, a very large one at that. People today even read and use blogs to gain political information and ideas. A newer type of blogging done today is video blogging or “vlogging”. This is again a journal online, yet it adds more to it than that; it adds video to the mix. Now people can see the person whose blog it is. One of the more popular vlogs was a series by Lonelygirl15. It was a video blog of a girl where she talks about her problems and thoughts. It became very popular, and people couldn’t wait for the next one to come out.

Twitter is like these previous forms of communication of the Internet yet still staying fresh in being a new idea. It is the idea of micro blogging, to where your “tweets” (blogs) have to be fewer than 140 characters. You can do multiple posts throughout the day, but the idea is not what you did today but what you are doing right now. This is a new idea because it now quicker and you don’t have to sit down and think about what you did today, you can just say “just ate bananas in my cereal for breakfast”. It becomes an emphasis on the mundane rather than the major events in someone’s life, and that fact makes this form of communication revolutionary. It makes the little things in life actually matter, and become more important to people. The fact that you can have the “tweets” sent to your phone so you don’t miss anything goes to show you how people now care about the simple things in life.

Twitter or something like twitter, has been around our whole lives. When we talk on the phone and we tell people we just ate, or tell someone what we were doing at the time. Or when you are with a group of friends and you talk about how your child had a noodle come out of his nose. It used to be called chatting. However, Twitter is most effective in the digital age. It allows us to anyone anytime. You don’t have to directly communicate with someone for them to see what your up to, they can just look online at your updates. Think of it as a new way to gossip, except the person writing the tweet is gossiping about themselves, to anyone that wants to hear. NBC and BBC use Twitter to deliver news and programming information. Corperations such as H&R Block and Dell use it to answer customer questions and “converse” directly with the customer. Authors are asking people to give short reviews of their work. Penguin Books has even distributed new titles using twitter. (Kroski, 1). Twitter is a powerful tool and we can use it for as much or as little as we want.

We know that Twitter is out there for people to get those mundane things out everyday, but how interactive is it really? This question is followed with another question, how interactive do you want it to be? Yes you can post your tweets anytime, but that only has so much interactivity. The true nature of interactivity is in the people following your tweets. As stated before they can have the tweets sent to their phone, so they know what your up to all throughout the day. They can even log in from their phone and write their own tweets. Also you can add pictures as part of your tweets, which Twitter calls “twitpics”. Even though it is limited to what you can or cannot do, Twitter still can be as interactive as you want it to be.

Twitter is an idea that has been brought about through years of journal keeping, blogging, vlogging, gossiping and chatting. Even though Twitter isn’t the most novel of ideas, it is still revolutionary because it has drawn the focus of the major events in everyday life to the now very mundane. People can see what you are doing throughout any part of the day. Even if they are not by their computers, they can still receive tweets via text message on their phones. It is fairly interactive medium, where you can “tweet” and receive tweets anytime as well as send “twitpics”. Twitter is limited to what you can or cannot do, but it can still be as interactive as you want it to be. The digital age really has revolutionized the way we communicate today, and Twitter is a result of that revolution.







Citations

Grossman, Lev, “Quitting Twitter”, Time Magazine, 3/16/2009, Vol. 173 Issue 10, p50

Kroski, Ellyssa. "All a Twitter: Want to Try Microblogging?" School Liabrary Journal (2008): All a twitter: Want to Try Microblogging? 1 July 2008. Reed Business Information. 9 Apr. 2009 .