Amanda Onofrio Blog #8

        Twitter, founded in 2006, is the social media platform that “has managed very successfully to embed itself deeply in the daily lives of its users” (Harrington et al., 2013). As my participation on Twitter increased greatly over the last few months, I can conform to the statement above. When I was first told by Dr. Bernabo that each individual in our class was going to be responsible for tweeting every day, Monday through Friday, along with retweeting at least ten tweets, I was feeling very hesitant. Prior to enrolling in this course, my personal Twitter account hadn’t been opened in months, much less even tweeted off of.

Twitter has never been one of my favorite platforms as I find myself participating in a lot of the uses and gratifications of social media on other platforms, like Instagram. I typically spend a lot of my time using Instagram as an “information seeking” platform where I am able to use “social media to seek out information or to self-educate” on all of my interests (Whiting & Williams, 364). I typically seek out information through the stories of various accounts that I follow and I use the Instagram explore page as a way to self-educate and learn more about fashion, fitness, food, etc.

However, I knew my journey on Twitter was going to have to start somewhere and I was open to learning more about its uses and gratifications and becoming a user of Twitter throughout this course. Considering it was my responsibility to tweet for this class, I always made it a goal to complete my daily tweets in the morning, right when I woke up. Throughout the day, I would usually check back into my account to see what some of my classmates had tweeted and knock out some retweets that way. I enjoyed learning more about my classmates through their daily tweets as it taught me more about their personalities and interests. It is true that “we present ourselves differently based on who we are talking to and where the conversation takes place” and the same goes for the way you present yourself online (Marwick & Boyd, 114). For this class, we had the option to create a new account or continue using our personal account. Although I decided to create a new one for this class, several of my classmates did not and this creates a divide in the production of tweets. We tweet to a constructed or imagined audience of who we believe the audience is; tweets are produced with the expectation that the audience will read it in a certain way. Therefore, every individual in the class’s tweets depended off of who their imagined audience was. This allowed for a variety of messages to be shared as no one person has the same concept of who their imagined audience is. 

       Throughout my experience of daily tweeting for this class, I found it challenging to come up with new, interesting, and engaging tweets that related to social media in some way every single day. At times, it would feel like I was tweeting about the same topics just worded differently. Additionally, if I was ever really stuck I would look through my feed and see what my classmates were tweeting about that day to help give me an idea of what I wanted to write about. Using my classmate’s tweets was a really helpful tool for me sometimes because reading other tweets helped stimulate new ideas for what it is I wanted to tweet about. It was also cool to see how the class came together when we would respond to each other’s tweets and others would chime in and voice their opinions as well. 

         I have never been one to watch the news everyday or know all the little details about what is going on in the world behind me. I didn’t really like this characteristic about myself because I would feel like the outlier whenever people would talk about worldly events that I didn’t even know about. I believe it is important to be educated about things like the country you live in, politics, the media, etc. Fortunately, tweeting everyday for this class allowed me to gain some knowledge about those things as I had to actually take the time to see what was going on in the world and then publish a tweet about it. 

                       

Considering this online social community was for scholarly purposes, it was important to me that I post appropriate, truthful, and interactive content for not only my classmates, but also my professor. I have never been a part of an online social community before but after learning about communities like Guyland, Return of Kings, and Incels I understood what their purpose was. Communities like these exist for the sole purpose of voicing opinions and sharing new and captivating content that will grab the public’s attention. Although the #cnusocialmedia Twitter community is much different than those like Return of Kings, it is still an online social community that was once created and is maintained because of individuals like myself and my classmates. I realized during this course that in order to maintain an online social community like this one I need to be an active participant and tweet about current social media events that will grab the attention of the entire #cnusocialmedia community. 

This community is a strong one as it has been kept alive and maintained since January of 2012. CNU students from almost a decade ago began this community with the same goal in mind: to engage with their peers through the creation of content regarding social media.

         Overall, after reflecting on my experience tweeting daily for this course, I have come to the realization that there are other, more interesting, and beneficial ways to become a more educated individual. The task sounded difficult to me in the beginning and I felt that I was going to be unable to tweet every day for four months. I am happy to say that those thoughts I had prior to beginning this assignment were wrong. I kept myself on track each week and made sure I completed my tweet for each day. As an individual who hates to procrastinate and work on assignments at the last minute, I was not going to settle for falling short on this simple task. I made sure at the end of each week that I had written one tweet each day with the hashtag “#cnusocialmedia” starting on Monday and ending on Friday. I would also do my best to retweet as many tweets as I could to make sure I had at least ten, however, it is possible that I could have fell short one or two retweets during a week of tweeting. Based on the guidelines laid out in the syllabus regarding “Twitter Posts,” I am confident that I completed the Twitter component of this class, precisely. With that being said, I feel that I should earn a numerical score of a 99% for the Twitter component of this class, given that I may have fell short a retweet or two during one week of the semester.

References 

Harrington, S., Highfield, T., & Bruns, A. (2013). More than a backchannel: Twitter and television. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 10(1), 405-409.

Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133. doi:10.1177/1461444810365313

Whiting, A. & Williams, D. (2013). Why people use social media: A uses and gratifications approach. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 16(4), 362-369. doi: 10.1108/QMR-06-2013-0041