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Anna Greathead

The Redemption of Twitter

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I have a love hate relationship with Twitter. On the one hand I have found myself embroiled in a lot of nasty arguments (mostly with Brexiters, Tories, Trump supporters and so on) but today Twitter, and WhatsApp were wonderful examples of 'backchannels' where conference observers discussed and commented and sometimes giggled a bit!

So here's some Twitter screenshots! They made me smile and, I think, demonstrate the softer side of networking. And by soft I mean 'hard to define' rather than 'unimportant'. The soft stuff is VERY important.

Twitter screen shot


Permalink 4 comments (latest comment by Stephen Rice, Monday, 24 Feb 2020, 15:53)
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Anna Greathead

Using Twitter

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Edited by Anna Greathead, Tuesday, 12 June 2018, 15:12

A few years ago I was sent on a few 'Using Social Media' workshops which were being offered to the employees of SMEs. 

The funniest one was the 'Facebook for Beginners' class in which it became very obvious, almost immediately, that I was far more expert than the tutor! I was an early adopter of Facebook and I knew my way around!

It was a bit like that this week. I have ebbed and flowed in my Twitter use for the past few years but I have, at various points, being quite active and I know my way around. I know about finding people and hashtags, I know how to send a tweet to a specific person, I know how to reply to another tweet and effectively begin or join a conversation, I know how to include a link. I even know how to shorten the link! 

I confess, though, I had not thought of Twitter as being useful before. I've used it to promote products at work and I've used to moan about panelists on Question Time (and judges on Strictly!), and I've used it to 'microblog' my activities. 

I looked at one article posted by Lynne (who is in my tutor group) but couldn't find any other content under the #H800 hashtag. Have other students not got this far yet or have they not used the hashtag? It wasn't part of the instructions yet was instinctive to me. 

Lynne's article looks interesting but I was on my phone so didn't risk my eyesight trying to read it in full. It was a tad old and suggested huge numbers of students use Facebook as a key part of their university application research - something I strongly suspect is no longer the case (young people don't use Facebook much - their parents are there!). However - the abstract and introduction did introduce the issue of 'blurring' caused by Facebook - the blurring of personal and professional, private and public, social and individual, opinion and information. I think this is a key quality (note - not a strength or weakness) of Web 2.0. Old distinctions, even firm demarcation lines, don't apply in the same way when we are online. 

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