Blog #8- @NathanGi11

3/25/20

@NathanGi11

 After a long enduring semester, it’s time to reflect on my own personal social media usage throughout this period. From the start of January 2020 to late April 2020 I was tasked with creating, maintaining, and engaging with my peers on Twitter’s social media platform. I did not have a twitter before the start of this class, nor did I ever have a personal Twitter account. I came to the game with a slight disadvantage but quickly learned how the platform operated and the hidden rules of what to do and expect on Twitter. The guidelines were clear and simple in laying out the requirements of the assignment. Students were required to tweet once every weekday with the hashtag ‘#cnusocialmedia’ and have a total of at least 10 retweets by the end of every week. Luckily, my generation was born into a digitalized era so adapting to social media related assignments became second nature with proven complications from time to time.

            The start of my journey began with setting up my profile. This is always an exciting part of joining new media platforms as you are able to dictate your own identity across this platform. It’s almost like choosing a character at the start of a video game. Do you wish to be the funny outgoing guy or the silent lurker with no profile picture; how about the avid content creator that posts 20 pictures a day or a more humbling yet adventurous type that has limited but fascinating photos. Coming into Twitter, I recognized who my target audience was and what I was comfortable with them seeing so I decided to keep it simple for the time being.  My Twitter handle was meant to be simple and effective as it identifies who I am. Then I selected a profile picture that best resembled myself with a splash of comedic relief and adventurous nature.

Me yawning in front of Westminster Abbey Collegiate Church

 The cover photo came quickly to as It shows some personality that I enjoy to relaxing in warm weather.

This may not seem all too interesting but everyone makes micro assumptions when viewing profiles and I wanted to portray myself in a positive light to my classmates. The final touch to my profile included a bio that stated the course I was a part of so other fellow students could easily identify me.

            Once everything was set up, I started with the task of Tweeting once a day. Initially, my tweets were very subpar as they were not too relevant to the coursework at hand. I had to keep in mind that I was supposed to be tweeting about social media related topics yet, my focus was on making people laugh and trying to tweet witty comments about CNU. This ended up falling flat on its face as I was made aware of my insufficient tweets that lacked course material. It wasn’t long after that I quickly started to get the hang of appropriate messages to tweet for my colleagues. With a couple of retweets here and there and a few ‘hearts’ on some memorable posts, I was zooming through this assignment one day at a time. By the time I started nearing the end of the road I took note of my experience on tweeter and the lasting impact it left.

            In the beginning, I treated tweeting like a hassle; it was just another assignment to check off my to-do list. Never had I thought using social media would be viewed as a chore but as time went on, that perspective quickly changed. I started noticing that I would tweet more than just the minimum once a day requirement. I was retweeting more than 10 posts and liking content that was outside of class parameters. It was a strange feeling as homework started to shift into an addiction. I noticed myself checking my account more frequently and even logging in during the weekends (when we don’t have to tweet). Twitter obviously molded to my collection of media applications that I regularly check throughout the day and it fits nicely right between Instagram and Snapchat. As mentioned in "More than a backchannel: Twitter and television", Twitter would compliment my other applications by verifying information and discovering trends from a wider media sphere (Harrington/Highfield/Bruns, 2013). I started saving ‘draft tweets’ that I thought would be appropriate to post later and would even check the app during spring break. Maintaining my twitter account was something that seemed to be difficult at first but became second nature after 2 weeks.

            Scrolling through my account left me with a couple of highlights worth sharing and some worth deleting. My very first tweet on the platform was a common joke held around campus arguing that Regattas cafeteria is better than Commons, despite them having practically the same food options. My next tweet was on an interesting fact about CNU campus and how they spray paint their grass green. Despite this being a verified fact (see photo evidence) it was to be relevant to the course material at hand. I would later continue to tweet like this for the first week and a half until I started orienting my tweets in a more class-friendly manner. My first substantive tweet came on January 21^st when I asked a critical question on “how future generations would be affected by creating usernames on social media platforms”. This tweet had a verity of impressions that triggered suggestions of limited username counts and possibly retiring old or inactive account names. Tweeting after this became much more relevant and engaging with classmates as I started asking questions, commenting on tweets, and creating/interacting with poll data. To this day, my most engaging tweet was somewhat of a humorous rhetorical question meant to lighten the mood of my fellow classmates.

Overall I am proud of the tweets I have posted (with a few exceptions like the selfie) and believe they accurately captured my learning experience throughout the course of Communication 322. If I were to give myself an honest rating on the content I posted and engaged with on Twitter, I would score a 7.5/10. I give this rating because of the initial rough start I had at the beginning of course. If a perfect twitter account was represented as a 10/10 I would also suggest that there was plenty of room for me to grow and post more engaging content filled tweets throughout the semester. I am thankful for the experience/assignment of creating and using a Twitter account and will be using it far beyond the content of this course. 

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