Week Eleven Response

All about Twitter:

one: you have no idea how tempting it is to write this post entirely in haiku. I have neither the time nor the mental energy at the moment to stick to such disciplined form, though, so I'll be blogging tonight in my normal, rambling fashion.

two: This week, in lieu of more academic readings, we were all required to make Twitter accounts, build a network of at least 25 people/entities related to our career paths and aspirations, and tweet or retweet at least five times, using the #si643 hashtag. My account is under @llpollac.

three: Twitter: the web interface --- I agree with everyone that says that it's suboptimal. Especially for this class assignment where we're supposed to be retweeting things with an added hashtag, since the web interface won't let you edit the text of a retweet. I was using Hoot Suite, which I'm also not a fan of. It's all sliding menus and frames. Maybe in that case I just need to have a bit more time to learn the interface better, but both the web interface and Hoot Suite seem clunky for something that's supposed to be so light. I've heard good things about Tweet Deck, but I refuse to download software to my computer for this assignment. I'm resentful enough about having to make two new social media accounts.

four: Twitter: building a network --- I started out with the bloggers from the key blogger assignment, and branched out from there, aided in a large part by the Twitter web interface's "similar" function. The frustrating thing was that I don't know who any of these people are, especially not by Twitter handles, and the information provided on their profiles really isn't enough to tell whether this is someone I want to be spammed by. Like, for example, take @mechalibrarian. His profile is "R. Bruno (mechalibrarian), New York. I'm a librarian in NYC who knows what the heck a diacritic is" with a picture of a man that we can probably safely assume to be R. Bruno, or at least his avatar. What does that actually tell you about these people? And the first page or so of tweets are of limited utility, because they're just as likely to be about some conversation they're having with someone else entirely or to be just plain minutia than to be something substantive. I ended up guessing and adding people with cool handles or that seemed to be both following and being followed by the bloggers that were the seed for this social experiment. I have no idea of what their interests are or anything, even after going back a few pages into some of their tweet backlog. I can make educated guesses about a few of them, based on which conference they seem to be tweeting/retweeting, but I would hardly call that conclusive evidence.

five: Twitter: the following experience --- As bad as I feared it would be. I'm semi-voluntarily overhearing a bunch of people that at best I barely know through their other online presences and at worst are total strangers (with the exception of @activelearning, of course) talk about things that I don't have the context for. It's like walking in on the middle of a conversation that's been going on so long, they don't need to define their terms anymore. And the minutia. Oh, the minutia! I don't care where people are going for lunch, whether there's wireless in the exhibition hall, or that someone is reading today's copy of the New Yorker. And short of defollowing people, there seems to be no way of improving the signal to noise ratio, which is so. much. in favor of the noise.

six: Twitter: the tweeting experience --- Why does anyone care what I have to say? I've made more than the five required tweets or retweets, and they feel like they're being fired off into the void. I don't have anything particularly valuable to say as far as original content goes, and what's the value of repeating what someone else has already said verbatim? When I say "RT @gigglesigh: #plwaconf The world is changing a lot faster than our public libraries are adapting to that change. #si643", what does that actually do? Serious question, someone please explain it to me. I understand that the purpose of it is supposed to be to move ideas around quickly, but what use is simply repeating something without the opportunity to add your own ideas or commentary to it? And in 140 characters, that's barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone trying to add something to someone else's idea. Instead, retweets seem to get tossed around mindlessly, and I'm not sure what they are actually doing. Also, I'm sure that it is possible to fit beautiful, coherent, fully developed messages, even arguments, into the space of 140 characters. As this blog entry might hint to you, I have not reached that degree of virtuosity yet. How do you say anything worth listening to in 140 characters? Less than that, by the time you subtract any hashtags and links in your post.

seven: My overall reaction as a private citizen --- Information overload!!! Death by 140 characters!!! Drown in the minutiae of people you don't even know!!! See your brain contract to the size of a text message!!! There's an obvious pun to be made about Twitter users!!! On a more serious note, while there are some people who fall to Twitter naturally, I am not one of those people. It just seems like even if something is being said, it drowns in the mess of all the other conversations you just can't filter out. I don't like having everything come in in chronological order, all muddled together; I'd rather see what one person has to say and give them my attention. I don't like how little substance there seems to be. Unless I know the person from an off-line acquaintance or from more substantive media, reading someone's Twitter feed doesn't give me any idea of what they're like, let alone what their interests, passions, and grand ideas are. And it all seems to be pointing outwards, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when all I see are descriptions and shortened links, what does that tell me if I choose not to follow those links? With a longer format, at least you can give a more substantial summary and some of your own thoughts, instead of just an implicit "I think this is interesting." Also, and this is just my baggage, I don't need another website, especially one that updates frequently. If I know that something is there, and that it changes, I have a hard time keeping myself from compulsively checking for updates. I'd managed to get myself off of all the Cheezburger Network sites, and Texts From Last Night, and so forth, and now I wasn't even given a choice about whether to take up with Twitter. Even if I delete my account at the end of class, I'm still going to know that it's there, and even if I know that there's nothing of substance, I'm still going to want to go back and check it.

eight: How I still might be able to make this a positive experience --- Even before this class, I did follow a couple of Twitter feeds in my Google Reader (the ALA joblist and a web cartoon that doesn't update very often), so I know that they can be useful, if used in the right way. And I've gone to a couple of public figure's websites to look at their Twitter feed in the box on their page, so there's another way that people can access Twitter if they don't want to deal with Twitter in its entirety. I have a feeling that for me personally, treating a few entities' feeds like any other RSS feed is the most useful and manageable. It's good for when someone is trying to push out a feed of information, but really really doesn't work as a conversational or critiquing tool. As a tool, I guess that having a Twitter is kind of essential now for libraries' online marketing and branding. And pushing information onto the Twitter feed is probably a good way to reach a lot of people at once, like all of you people who were on Twitter already or have become enamored of it after this week. As long as it doesn't become the only way that people can find out about something, I guess it's all good.

tl;dr --- We used Twitter this week, I don't particularly like it, but it's probably useful in some circumstances.