If you are reading this, then you are likely signed up for one of my courses in USF’s undergraduate Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major. I am requiring you to use Twitter for the semester in some fashion.
I want to briefly go over a few basics and point you in the direction of some materials. Even if you are already familiar with Twitter, and have an active account, please read this.
Choosing a User Name
I am very glad that people cannot read anything I wrote when I was 19. I don’t remember 99% of it, but I am pretty sure that I would now think it is dumb. Fortunately, I went to school way back before any of this interwebs nonsense and had to write papers uphill both ways to school. In short, there is no digital record of my learning.
Today, that is often not the case. From blogging to Facebook to Twitter students leave a digital trail. I highly advise you create an anonymous identity for your twitter account. Don’t use an email account that contains your real name. Choose a handle that is professional enough that you won’t mind when and if you later decide to “come out” (such as Oisin or Insignificant Wrangler or Santosis).
People Suck
Not all of them. Most people are kind. But there are a few people out there who are rude, obnoxious jerkwads. And, if you are on Twitter, you will find them. Some are trolls out to pester and annoy. Some are hateful or ignorant people committed to remaining ignorant and hateful to anything different from their very small identities. First and foremost: don’t be either. Don’t poke around looking for fights. And if someone harasses you, then learn how to block them.
Men are Horrible
Again, not all of them. If you are a woman, and you post a picture of yourself online, then you will likely at some point be harassed. This is one reason why I advise changing your profile picture to something other than a personal photo.
Take Julie Pagano’s Advice
Julie Pagano, a software engineer and tech activist, has written two great primers for dealing with people on Twitter. I strongly recommend reading both of them:
Below is an old post and my first attempt to preface using Twitter
I feel like I should justify why I am making you use twitter in this class. So here goes.
Given that this is a writing class, it is my job to introduce you to a range of tools that help facilitate writing. Some of these are research tools, such as Google Scholar and delicious (which we look at in a previous class). Others, however, deal with distribution. Certainly medium.com does that. But so does twitter.
A few months ago, an infographic made the rounds detailing which social media technologies top corporations were using. Unsurprisingly, twitter tops the list. Although I wonder about there methodology, since I find it hard to believe that only 4 corporations maintain an active facebook presence. But I digress. My point: in the 21st century, being literate requires a familiarity with a new range of tools. I am reminded of Steven Johnson’s 2005 article comparing the web to ecosystems: if you don’t want your piece to end up unattended, in the desert of the web, if you want it to attract attention, to be a part of the vibrant rainforest, then you need to know how to leverage social media.
And, thus, we tweet. I imagine that a number of you are already familiar with twitter. But I don’t want to assume that you are all digital natives, and so I will take some time today to introduce twitter and three terms associated with it: timeline, follow(ers), and the almighty hashtag.
- Timeline: For those used to facebook, twitter will initially appear like a completely clusterfuck. It can be disorienting. This is because the twitter timeline is simply a running list of all the posts made by anyone you follow (with a few scattered advertisements, or promoted posts, thrown in). Also, some of the feed might seem nonsensical, since it is possible to read only a part of conversations. Recently, twitter changed the way it organized conversations, linking together responses. But even this can be difficult to follow at first. Advice: Just jump in and get used to the chaos. After awhile, it will seem far less disorienting.
- Follow(ers): When you first join twitter, your timeline will be empty. You first have to populate it by following people. I have asked that you follow me for this class. I will post links to these daily class notes out via twitter. Also, I will ask that you follow everyone else who is in the class. This makes it easy to ask questions and facilitate discussion. To Do: I want you to send out a tweet with a 140 character description of your topic.
- Hashtag: The hashtag is what really powers twitter, what organizes the chaos. Advice: Try not to post anything to twitter that doesn’t contain a hashtag. Rule #1: Every time you read something for your project in this class, or anytime you read something that connects to a project someone else is working on, post it to twitter with the hashtag #enc3310. Got that? #enc3310. Rule #2: Every time you post an essay to medium.com, tweet out a link to the piece with some kind of description.
Some other pieces of twitter advice/resources:
- Working in 140 characters is tough. It requires concision. If absolutely necessary, you can chain tweets together by numbering them. For instance, check out Mark Cuban’s twitter apology. So, on the first tweet, you have a short title, like Apology 1/5. Then every other tweet just has a different number. This lets people know there’s more than one tweet in the chain.
- Because every character is precious, we don’t want to waste characters on long links. Use something like tinyurl.com to shorten and redirect links.
