Twitter: What is it good for! Absolutely Nothing?

Twitter is :

 A short burst of inconsequential information.

OR

Chirps from birds.

(Cross 2011, p. 58)

This is exactly what Twitter is, short status updates made up of 140 characters or less.  Twitter has evolved using other technologies such as the first mobile phones that could use up to 160 characters in a text and other social networks such as Facebook and Myspace.
 
Though is it all inconsequential information?

 Well most of it is, such as the aesthetically pleasing photos of your breakfast.  However, Twitter is also being used for political, social and cultural reasons.   An example of political usage is during President Obama’s election campaign he used Twitter as a platform to connect with potential voters.  It gave him a distinct advantage and was a first for politics.

Past reports have also linked people to using Twitter in a crisis.  In November 2008, 10 terrorists took over 2 hotels in Mumbai.  The television feeds were shut down as the terrorist were using it for their own purposes and so the victims in the hotel tweeted for help.  They were able to provide up-to-the-minute updates on the situation as it unfolded (Cross 2011, p. 58).  Twitter has also been used in other times of crisis; the earthquakes in both Haiti and Japan and the Victorian bushfires. 

The situation with Japan is actually quite close to my heart my host sister, Nami lived in one of the affected areas. Through social networking she let us know that she was OK.
 

When using Twitter you’re not constrained to a computer, it’s portable as long as you have a smart phone device hence why Nami could tell me she was OK.  On a global scale Twitter is available in 6 languages; English, French, Japanese, German, Italian and Spanish and is available in 26 countries for mobile device users.  This can lead to the exclusion of some audiences such as people that don’t own mobile devices (older generations).

Some countries would rather social media sites did not exist.  The Iranian government attempted to cut off sites such as Facebook and Twitter to stop the flow of information in and out of the country to stop activists from communicating in regards to their protests.  Henry Jenkins, media scholar and theorist says that we’re living in a world of participatory culture ‘where we take media into our own hands, where we have the capacity to produce media, to share media’ (DMLResearchHub 2011).

So whilst we’re practicing using media i.e. posting photos of our breakfast, some of us go onto tackling major issues such as sharing protest information. And so where there is a will there is a way… Activists used proxy servers to get past this and used sites such as Twitter to communicate in real time to ex-patriots in America and other Western Nations (Acohido 2009). 

However, Twitter is primarily used socially and you can connect with friends at any time of the day.  As opposed to a text message Twitter’s major drawcard is that it is free.  I can’t say that I’m a regular user of Twitter but one of the main reasons I have a Twitter account is that I can ‘follow’ celebrities. 

One of my favourite celebrities is Xfactor judge, Demi Lovato.  Lovato has built a strong following of fans which she has affectionately dubbed ‘Lovatics’.  Demi tweets well throughout the day but she also ‘retweets’.  Just recently the Xfactor judge asked her ‘Lovatics’ to vote the contestant she was mentoring and ‘retweeted’ her followers messages, acknowledging them and making them feel special.      

So what next for Twitter? 

Will it be around forever? Or will it drop off the face of the Earth? Like Myspace did. 

There isn’t anything conclusive to say what the future has in store for Twitter and the organisation of Twitter certainly holds its cards close to their chest.  Though with the increase of people aligning together, in what theorist, Howard Rheingold calls virtual communities (people linked by their participation in computer networks) (ScottLondon, n.d.).   Twitter seems to be growing faster than ever.  So we’ll see.

Reference List

Cross, M 2007, Bloggerati, Twitterarti: How Blogs and Twitter are Transforming Popular Culture, Greenwood Publishing /group, EBL Ebook Library, viewed 7 December 2012.

Acohido, B, 2009, Iranian activists use Twitter, proxy servers to deliver news from the streets, The Last Watchdog, viewed 7 December 2012, http://lastwatchdog.com/iranian-activists-twitter-proxy-servers-deliver-news/

DMLResearchHub 2011, Media Scholar Henry Jenkins on Participatory Culture and Civic Engagement, 4 August, viewed 8 December 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgZ4ph3dSmY

ScottLondon n.d., Book Review: The Virtual Community, n.d. viewed 8 December 2012, http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/rheingold.html