Using twitter

Day 19 -

"just joined Twitter and is fairly baffled so far..."

That was my first tweet on the 29th June 2009.  903 tweets later and I'm still going, though I'm not completely addicted as that relatively low number suggests.  I began with tweets about graduating with hayfever,

"Is only a graduand for but a few hours - then a graduate it is. He signed on too. He is getting out his white bow tie and about to sneeze. (03.07.09)"

I tweeted about relatives

"is in Blair Drummond in a lovely B+B - it's a bit like visiting family but the family at the B+B are somewhat better than my relatives! (04.07.09)"

 I tweeted along with friends in our far-flung cities about applying to jobs

"Morning all! I feel like I just arrived in the office...you're like my work colleagues in the interim I suppose. (09.07.09)"

That was when I realised that twitter was not a fad and was actually an incredibly clever idea.  My friends and I would sit and tweet at each other as we applied for jobs, sharing experiences and frustrations, sharing opportunities and ideas and bemoaning the job centre.  Doing this is nothing new, we could have spoken on the phone, we could have participated in a forum, but twitter provided us with a platform where we were part of each others information to monitor along with the news sources, jobs websites, organisations we aspired to work for.  In a nutshell, twitter gave me rolling news that was personalised for me.  I can't say it helped a lot in finding work, but this period showed me that twitter is a platform for sharing information.  A lot of people denigrate it because of its character limit of 145 characters per tweet, but rather than limiting information this gives a pleasant uniformity to the content that is rolling up on the timeline and gives nuggets of information along with links to more extensive content.  With the use of the #hashtag information is organised and made more useful.

I protect my tweets, so there is no point even thinking I add to the debate; I can't even be retweeted.  However, I tend to tweet about my interests and activities, fully acknowledging that my tweets are inconsequential.  I hope occasionally to amuse and inform my followers but my tweets tend to be social.  They might communicate with colleagues across the office, they might arrange events that take place in my social life, they might send messages of solidarity to those I want to support.  However, I have made twitter personal wallpaper news.  Before twitter I was a BBC News 24 junkie.  I could sit for ages just absorbing what was going on.  Now I use twitter, and so while I'm sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon with a book, I have twitter rolling along beside me tweeting about my interests; news alongside comment from sources I know, enjoy reading and trust.  A drawback of choosing your sources, of course, is a lack of objectivity.  Only following sources that report from, or eer with, a particular political persuasion can limit your information, but these sources are more likely to provide information that is useful and relevant to you.  Given the drawback here, I want to make clear that I don't want twitter to replace solid, objective news (Radio 4 until I die), but twitter certainly has a role to play.  Not only will it cover everything that anyone wants to tweet, which can lead to insurgent campaigns having a platform (#savelibraries as an excellent example), but it is omnipresent via smartphone.  On the March for the alternative on 26th March, twitter was a very useful source of information - without it the group of librarians I was marching with wouldn't have known about the simultaneous action by UK uncut and other groups.

Twitter has been quite a random success.  Facebook's wall has even started to emulate it with facebook diversifying into 'pages' as well as 'friends'.  I think it shows how a versatile idea can be embraced.  In itself, twitter is not a useful platform, but it has successfully become an online institution for the following reasons.  1. It has become an information source that people actively decide to update when something important changes, 2. whole sectors are using it for peer to peer interaction and best practise sharing (particular mention of libraries here) and 3. Lay expertise have a place to flourish alongside the professional, and the casual observer becomes as important as the correspondent.  All of these things have made twitter a formidable source, and a welcome addition to the information universe.  It recognises the fundamental importance of sharing information and sets out a comprehensive way to do this.  As for why I protect my tweets, incidentally, wherever information leads, spam tends to follow and on such a large scale I just can't abide it.