How dare SlateV make fun of Twitter like this! Their conclusions about why people use twitter can not be any further from the truth! Twitter is a tool designed so that people can get better understanding of each other's lives, interests, and activities without the awkwardness in people's lives. That is far from caring about speed, or shortness of the messages. the 140 character limit is not necessarily just to make blogging shorter, its so that the messages are simple and short expressions of themselves. Reading these messages is a matter of being interested in the person or organization that tweeted and having an idea of what they are doing or thinking.
Enough playing devils advocate. What I really think though is that a tool is what the user makes of it. Twitter is a tool to broadcast your thoughts or information easily and get to other's easily and quickly. But it becomes too much if people start recording every insignificant moment of their lives on it. Flutter is basically what will happen if people become to obsessed with twittering and sharing these things to the point where they can't discriminate what and when to share.
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It would be sad to see Flutter become the next micro-blogging platform. Twitter at least gives you enough room to write a full sentence. Although it could be possible in future, I cannot truly envision people communicating in such small vowel-less bursts. I am pretty sure that a Flap does not even use more than one line in a standard text box. Hopefully a micro-blogging application such as Flutter will never see the light of day.
ReplyDeletesorry Asher but we gamers have already pwnd the vowel-less bursts.. anyway I personally like the fact Kim that you remind us that twitter is a tool. These tools all have some potential for both being useful and absolutely wasted. Twitter was wasted by the media in a sense by making it a vanity peg to add to their list of titles. Other companies have used it to let people know when new information is out on a product. But I do agree that people should not overuse twitter. maybe there should be some sort of limit on how much a individual is allowed to tweet in a day. If there was a limit maybe people would not waste their tweets...or their time.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how Harrison emphasized the idea of self-expression as a motivation to tweet. I think when you look at twitter through the lens of self-expression rather than through the lens of communication, you gain a better understanding of why tweets are short and full of bad grammar. As Harrison said, we tweet to broadcast ourselves, not to communicate with individuals--thus, poorly worded and constructed sentences cannot be judged as a degraded form of communication. They are simply a way of presenting ourselves to many others.
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