Good Evening,
My name is Ralph E. Emig Jr. and
what follows is the result of my “Twitter Adventure” assignment for my ETEC 527 Web 2.0 Tech for Instruction
class conducted the week of 1/23/2017.
This week I took the path most traveled and began to explore Twitter for the first time ever. I know, I know, how could I have possibly made it this long without a Tweet? Well to begin with I have to admit that without this course, I would probably gone my whole life without using Twitter. Even now I’m really not convinced that it is a Web 2.0 Tool that I will get much mileage out of but I am willing to give it a try, just don’t ask me to Facebook, that’s a deal breaker. I am a social network dinosaur, a throw back from a bygone era when people actually wrote and mailed real honest-to-goodness letters to one-another, spoke in person, shook hands, etc… Today’s digital age just seems so… impersonal.
It’s more than a little unsettling
for an “old-timer” like myself to realize just how rapidly our technology is
developing/expanding into practically every aspect of our lives at school, work,
and at home. The roman dramatist Publius
Terence Afer (190-159 B.C.) is credited with the quote “Moderation in all things.”
In her book City of Lost Souls, Cassandra Clare writes “Too much of anything could destroy you. Too much darkness could kill, but too much
light could blind.” And finally, in
a book of quotes entitled “Don’t Waste
Your Life,” John Piper suggests that “America
is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.” I sincerely hope that we are not on a path
which eventually leads to us to trading our humanity for an immersive, virtual,
depersonalized environment devoid of physical contact or genuine one-on-one
interactions with others.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out
of my system I will try to give an honest accounting of my experiences with Twitter
this week. Firstly, I really never
understood how Twitter worked and that is perhaps part of the reason I never
took the time to investigate it, until now of course. Twitter seems, in my very limited experience,
to be a free Web 2.0 tool for linking friends, family, and business associates
together in an effort to communicate questions, answers, ideas, and information
quickly and efficiently so long as it is written using 140 characters or
less. Why 140 characters? It seems such an arbitrary number, why not
100, or 150, or even 200 characters?
What is so magical about 140? I
understand the need to keep the messages short, concise, and to the point to
avoid someone rambling on and on, like I’m doing right now, but how did they
come up with 140 characters? It boggles
the mind. And why call the people in
your favorites list “followers?” Was I
the only one who took the time to watch the crime drama “the Following” about a
charismatic PSYCHOPATH named Joe Carroll who, much like Charles Manson,
convinced others to risk everything, including their lives, to kill in his
name. “Followers?” Sounds a little cultish to me, very disturbing!
Sorry about that, I apologize unreservedly
and I digress. In my virtual travels
this week I found with a little questioning and some research that, in most
cases, those that you follow will follow you back, helping to create a sense of
community on-line. Kind of sounds like
“stalking” to me but again, I am trying to keep an open mind. I also came across a Twitter plugin called WordPress which will automatically
display the most recent tweets, including date and time, for any user and
automatically broadcast them to all of the account holder’s “followers,”
there’s that damn term again, to keep everyone connected. An upside to Twitter, is that this service
allows individuals to “get to know” persons with whom they might have never
come in contact with otherwise. It
brings the world a little closer, connecting individuals with like interests,
allowing them to keep up with current trends, content-sharing, and current
events. I have to grudgingly admit that
Twitter could even have a potential
place in my world as an educator, possibly... Maybe, we’ll see.
Heck, there are even “curators” in the Twitter-verse who’s
only role is to aggregate information for “followers” who don’t have the time,
or patience, or desire to do it for themselves.
(F.Y.I. Aggregate is just fancy
speak for collecting, combining, or amassing information.) Twitter also has the uncanny ability to let
you know what’s going on at this very moment in the world, right now, from a
multitude of perspectives. With Twitter Search you can simply type in
any topic and instantly see what people are tweeting about it or, if you have an
iPhone and I do, you can download the mobile app Tweetbot which will automatically check the news for what is going
on in the world especially if you are a “follower” of @WhiteHouse,
@BreakingNews, @FOX4, @NHL, or even @espn.
I never noticed before but now that I’m looking, almost every website
that I visit I see that little white bird superimposed onto a blue
background… They’re everywhere! It’s an entire flock, no, that’s not quite it. It’s a mass migration! With so many people onboard with this Web 2.0
tool perhaps I should be too. Maybe,
we’ll see.
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