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.
