Virtual Learning Environments

Before I dive into some last minute thoughts on Twitter regarding the reading from a few weeks ago, I want to say that both presentations were incredibly informative.  The work done for my group’s project (group one) and learning about the Ethnography project have both been very helpful to expanding my media studies knowledge base.

The subject of Twitter has been popping up for me a lot lately in my personal, professional, and academic spheres.  Before starting this course, I can honestly say that I had very limited interest in Twitter.  I was aware of its popularity and marketing uses, but I was not interested in signing up for another social medial platform.  Keeping up with Facebook and blogging was enough for me, and I didn’t find it necessary to add to my overall internet presence with creating a Twitter account.  I begrudgingly signed up for Twitter because it was necessary for this course.  However, I quickly was cured of my anti-Twitter stance once I was using it more frequently.

The reading assigned about Twitter seemed to validate many of my thoughts regarding the mark Twitter has made on the media world.  I use Twitter everyday now for my job because it is a great platform to get news delivered to me in a timely manner.  I write for a news website that is in the process of being launched, and we rely heavily on Twitter each day.  We use Twitter to aggregate information for potential stories as well as spread the stories are covering.  Of course, it is also an integral part of the site’s overall marketing plan.  I can say that I was quickly proven wrong this summer on my aversion to Twitter considering the way it allows me to easily and quickly locate news.

In the reading, the importance of listening and giving feedback is discussed.  I think this is the only place where Twitter currently falls short.  People still think of it as more of a “one-way” platform of communication.  However, this is quickly progressing.  Even in the short amount of time I have been using Twitter, I have noticed how people are using it more conversationally.  I think the point made in the reading about the importance of listening and giving feedback is an interesting aspect of social media to consider.  Twitter can be an outstanding platform for any person’s needs if they use it to its full advantage, and sometimes that means responding to others just as much as putting your own thoughts out there.

I’m interested to see how Twitter evolves in the future.  I know that I am not the only one surprised by a sudden interest in Twitter after signing up for it to meet the needs of this course.  Twitter is a much more user-friendly and less involved platform than many other social media sites, and we are still just beginning to see the power to Twitter in the media world.

Here’s an interesting article about the importance of Twitter to American Business.

I have had many a discussion with friends about Twitter and its usefulness vs. uselessness.

I went to do see a panel in early June called “The Future of Media” that included Nick Denton of Gawker Media, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bonnie Fuller of Bonnie Fuller Media, Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray, and Craigslist founder Craig Newark. All of them were talking about what a huge deal Twitter was becoming and would continue to be, what a powerful tool it is, etc. I wrote a blog about this talk, which inspired a 25+ message exchange on Facebook about the Twitter phenomenon between myself and a friend from undergrad who was in my Film and Media Studies program with me.

So the following is from said friend on my Facebook in response to my status update that said “The Future of the Media is, apparently, all about Twitter” and then linked to my blog on the topic. Please note that I’ve changed all of the places where he’s decided to use an offensive term for Twitter (take away the “i” and replace it with an “a”) with a more PG version of the term:

Must everything be shortened to one sentence in order to be consumed in milliseconds? I don’t see the purpose of this site other than to give one sentence, and therefore poor, recaps of other stories from other sources…Self-indulgence is still very much a part of the [Twitter] universe it’s just now you can get some news updates I guess while you’re being self-indulgent. They can slap some polish on the turd but I’m still not impressed. I think it’s a horrible symptom of a larger disease that is the breakdown of our communication masked as the evolution of our communication. Dumb down everything. Reduce everything to a headline or a soundbite. One sentence is all we need. The phone call has already been replaced with the text. We’ve sacrificed in-depth analysis with the one-sentence [tweet] and people think it’s great because it’s easily accessible.

While I think some of what he says has validity, he has obviously not spent much time exploring the site or taking advantage of the @replies functionality or the search engine, which causes him to think it’s “largely the narcissistic updates every 5 minutes of the minutiae going on in people’s lives” as well as just being “a poor man’s Google News”.

I think that writers using Twitter is a way of journalism adjusting to the way that their information is presented to the public and is in no way destroying communication. If anything, it is opening up new, different avenues of connectivity.

What do you all think? I have started going to several new sites to obtain my news that I never looked at before because of Twitter and think of it as a very useful tool…but then again, I am a student of media and tend to be on the more accepting side of the “our world is changing” coin. I have also heard from all of my job-seeking friends that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job as a writer or a PR individual if you aren’t an active tweeter.

This is hard for me to say, but I was wrong. I always had a very negative view of twitter (maybe it’s the name). I haven’t completely embraced it and connected to any prospective industry contacts with it, but I have signed up for twitter updates from some of my favorite news sources, and I’ve looked through some of the tweets the rest of you have put on your tweeter rolls on the wiki. I guess my issue with twitter was always that I didn’t like the constant dumbing down of communication. The trend from Newspapers to Blogging to Micro-blogging put me in a state of fear that soon ideas would be communicated in the most basic sense. What I mean is complex or iconic events being condensed into simple contextless statements instead of informative reports “michael jackson dead.” “Iran oppresses people”. The more I looked through twitter and even used it I realized that I was absolutely right, but that’s not a bad thing. I signed up to BBC world news and CNN breaking news because I looked through their tweets and saw headlines of stories  I wanted to read, I realized that it wasn’t much different than looking at newspaper headlines at news stands, but as a bonus I can do it in my underwear and not have frightened people staring at me in disgust. Oh, and I comment on the story and allow people who follow me to see ideas and help spread that story (theoretically speaking, I don’t have many followers yet). I see this as potentially as a strong tool in industry as well, granted I have no connections, I can see how after becoming part of a twitter network getting my ideas out or even just getting my name known would be easier than if twitter were never introduced.