The Twittersphere!

The blog seems to revolve around the heavier, negative ideas surrounding new media forms, so I thought I’d spend a blog to talk about Twitter! Personally, I think it’s great. The microblogging service allows users to 140 character long ‘updates’ which show up on the timelines of that user’s followers.

In terms of privacy, there’s only so much information you can share about yourself on you Twitter profile, so unless you post something really ridiculous like “Going to the forest tonight at 1am, by myself”, you’re pretty safe.

Twitter allows for average everyday people (that’s us, guys) to follow celebrities and high profile characters. It has kind of bridged the gap between the somebodies and the nobodies, allowing anyone to communicate with anyone.

Even news networks and journalists have joined in on the fun. 3 News (@3NewsNZ) has their own Twitter feed, through which latest headlines can be posted. This service provides followers with the ability to access news as it happens.

What I especially like about Twitter is that no matter how many people I follow, I can never run through my timeline or Tweet myself for more than ten minutes, if that. There is very little room for addiction. Sure, there are some extreme cases and some people will Tweet their live instead of actually talking. But in reality, Twitter is just a forum for short updates and links to external sources.

The only real debate against Twitter would be that people who have it for personal use are more or less wasting their time throwing these updates into cyberspace,or the Twittersphere, where no one else will really care about them.


I say, don’t hate. Twitter is a wonderful example of a new media form which allows for the expression and performance of self identity (in a 140 character limit medium) (and I blatantly just incorporated one of the essay questions into my blog).