I found the article ‘How Twitter Will Change The Way We Live’ to be very interesting. As a new Twitter user, although I often forget to Tweet when I’m not concentrating on my DIGC enterprises, I have definitely found myself immersed in following interesting people and trending topics. The ease of which you can skip from one persons thoughts to anothers and follow their conversations and topics to other peoples conversations and topics is astounding, however I too was very apprehensive about the platform when joining. The most apt quote for me within the piece is ‘we don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask’.
From a DIGC perspective, I could relate to the notion of the ‘open conversation’ explored throughout the reading in regard to our tutorials every week. Although Twitter allows for us to interact and participate in the conversation throughout, does this somewhat replace actual spoken conversation? Often two very different discussions will be taking place aloud and via Twitter. We have no problem Tweeting the person sitting next to us, but asking for a pen or about the course content? Noo sir, that’s a bit confronting. I agree that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be very useful and entertaining to be engaged in, however we must ask ourselves what this replaces within our daily lives.
According to Neilson (as shown), Australian users spend the most time visiting social networks and blogs. Perhaps this is because we are marked on it? Doubtful. ** However, as noted in the lecture, many of us have come to consider blogs and social networks to be valuable news sources. Although many of us (myself included) believed these sources often lacked credibility, due to scalability and the short feedback loop available to non-traditional news sources, often information is first dessiminated through these platforms. Yes, often I will Google the news to make sure the ‘news’ is not just rumours, and I definitely do not believe everything posted upon Facebook or Twitter, however often the rumours are confirmed. Living away from my home town, often I first hear local news from their on Facebook, and as such I do consider the information valuable. Although very open to global news, in this way social networking sites (SNS) are reflective of the very first newspapers, which were seen as hyper-local and important to that community.
Communication and news-sharing between many members of many different communities occurs daily via SNS, most broadly through Twitter. I believe Johnsons’ notion of ‘bridges made of pebbles’ is demonstrated nicely through a case I followed a while back. Up and coming Melbournian musician Ben Abraham (http://twitter.com/#!/benabrahammusic) created a YouTube video performing a song he wrote asking Canadian musician Sara Bareilles (http://twitter.com/#!/SaraBareilles) if he could perform a song with her on her forthcoming tour to Melbourne. To quote Sara ‘I received a video on Twitter, from like ten billion people’, and so they performed together. Very cool, and nicely demonstrates the impact an aggregation of Tweets can have, joining two previously completely unrelated people together.
Check it out; they’re both very cool.
**Interesting to discover Evan Williams, co-creator of Twitter also launched Blogger; coincidence we must use these platforms Ted?
An interesting quote you have there: 'we don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going'. That's one way to rationalise twitter, however it is certainly presumptuous in that Twitter answers a question that nobody asked. Twitter and Facebook although good for keeping up with friends, is also a bit much in that you are assuming people want to read about you. The scary thing is, a lot of people do.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there will ever be a day when asking someone a question in personal will be a faux pa. A day when "how are you?" will be met with "didn't you read my tweet?".
@Robert, I hadn't thought about it that way! That would be very funny, but I definitely hope we do not reach the point where we rely that heavily on Twitter. However, this is not too different to the reliance many have on Facebook, to find out about events and what their friends are up to. Often in conversation I hear 'oh did you see ___'s status/photo?' etc. Maybe Twitter is just a little less integrated into our close friends lives, perhaps just a step behind?
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