Twitter and micro-blogging reflections

Note the people & interests you followed – who/what? Reflect on the people & interests you followed & why: How do your friends tweet? What did you learn about them? What did you learn about their interests? What did you gain/learn about your ‘interests’? How is this different than traditional media?

Based on the people I follow, the majority of them are people I know, being close friends or just people from school. I also follow professional athletes from my favorite teams and actors and actresses from either my favorite shows or movies. This week alone I have followed roughly 6 new twitter accounts. Most of these accounts are parody accounts and I follow these accounts because I find there tweets very funny. My friends tweet based on what there doing and they also tweet at other people about what they are going to do today. They also do alot of retweeting and they retweet people that I follow, which shows that we have alot of similarities. They also retweet people that I do not follow, and I though to myself why. Once I looked through various twitter accounts, I gave in and just followed them just because my friends follow them as well. I think what I learned the most is that my friend have many different interests than me, which is okay because I get to finally understand who they are as a person and what they find interesting. It is different from traditional media such as the radio, television and phone because these are not immediate things you can get from your friends. Social media is instant and it allows people to connect to anyone that they choose.

How did you go about searching for your topic/issue of interest? What did you learn? How is this information/knowledge different than what you might find traditionally about your topic/interest

I actually found some interesting topics that I had no idea about. Once was the earthquake that hit Ottawa, which was surprising because nothing on the news really talked about it or mentioned it. Another news story was about rob ford and him being involved in a crack cocaine video, which has become viral. Both stories were immediately shown on social media through twitter accounts such as global, chch news and city news, which has moved into a different direction into not only presenting it through traditional media, but through social media as well.

What trending topic did you decide to investigate? What did you learn about it? What do the trending topics say about our culture or society?

I investigated the #earthquake topic that hit Ottawa and Toronto. What I learned through tweets made by people that what people say can affect what other people say as well. There was a twitter picture of lawn table and chairs and one of them fell over, and on the top it said "we will rebuild, toronto earthquake", and as soon as that picture was tweeted, people began making other funny tweets as well about this "earthquake". Even one of my friends made a funny tweet about it saying "was that an earthquake or rob ford getting out of bed", which I then favorite it. What it says about society is that we can overreact to something that is not merely as important, but we do this because we want to express ourselves and voice what we think other people might find amusing and would want to favorite or retweet it.

Reflect on your own twitter identity & tweeting; How and what did you tweet? How did you decide what image or identity to present? How did you use twitter most often – via web or on smart phone – why?

During this week, most of my tweets were on the Monday, when then leafs played. Through the night, I would tweet about the game and how well they were doing, until they lost, which in that point my tweets were more defensive towards other people. Besides that, my tweets were mostly what I am doing and how I am feeling. I decided to image myself as someone who I think I can be proud of when tweeting and interacting with other people. If I am at home, I usually tweet on my computer. If I am on the go, I usually tweet with my Ipod or my phone because it is simple and easy to do. I think it is just a habit that whenever I'm out or not on my computer, I just use my phone or Ipod to tweet.

Overall, what are your thoughts about your own tweeting experience? Positive/Negative, useful or not for you – why?

I think it has been a positive experience to be able to express what is going on in my life and to share my interests to my followers about what I find interesting. Twitter has been useful because you can get another perspective on stories that might of been seen on traditional media sources. Social media has given people a voice behind the computer screen or cellphone and  makes communicating with people much easier for us to do.

How has reading & writing changed with micro-blogging practices? (think about the structure of tweeting & language used).

Not really, whenever I write a paper or an a assignment, I use the writing skills that have been taught to me by my teachers. The practices that I have taught myself through micro-blogging  has made writing easier whenever I tweet or text my friends. But they differ from writing at school because I separate work from play. I figured that the micro-blogging practices that I learned by my own I would not use in a paper because the language and structure is not correct by society. But more and more, people use these micro-blogging practices in there papers, which is why many people do not get the grades they were expecting to get.

What are some of the benefits & constraints of twitter, tweeting, or micro-blogging practices overall?

Benefits for twitter is of course being able to connect with other people, share things with them about yourself and be able to get immediate raw stories than through traditional media. Society wants information easily and as quickly as possible, and as stories become faster for us to get, time feels faster for us, which makes it a constraint for people because as much we love to get things to us asap, we want to live in the moment. Other constraints is the 140 characters we can only express in a tweet, and the inability to show our emotions and feelings through f2f, instead its through screen-to-screen.