blog #8

My Daily Tweets

It is absolutely no question that I love social media. I find every aspect of it so interesting, from how we interact, to how algorithms change, and why some people are drawn to some platforms more than others. When I found out we would be tweeting daily I was pretty excited to see how it would go. Twitter is something I use on a daily basis and this is a common trend. According to Harrington (2013) twitter “has managed very successfully to embed itself deeply in the daily lives of its users” (Harrington et al., 2013). Although this was not true for me in 2013, it definitely has been since about 2016. Twitter is a site I can find news, interact with friends, discover new artists, new music, and find very funny content which is why I think it has become so popular in my life. 

For the longest time I was pretty quiet on twitter, I would retweet things and tweet pictures but rarely created my own textual content. I think this was because I didn’t really know who my audience was or the type of information I would share. This was why I think I was one of the few students that decided to use my personal twitter for this semester long assignment. I knew this would be interesting because a lot of my friends use twitter for fun and memes, not really for educational purposes. However, this was not my first time having to tweet for class but, in the past, I only had to tweet about once a week to fulfill the requirement. 

When I first started tweeting daily I noticed that sometimes I felt a little embarrassed because it was not how I originally presented myself on the platform. I think I felt like this because so many students at cnu made comments on how annoying seeing all of the #cnusocialmedia tweets was. Because of this feeling it really solidified the idea that “we present ourselves differently based on who we are talking to and where the conversation takes place” (Marwick & Boyd, 114). However, it only took about a week until I became interested in what my classmates were tweeting, and I started to enjoy engaging with them more on twitter and learning about their interests and habits. Once I started to know my classmates more, tweeting was much easier because I knew who my audience was and the type of content we all liked to interact with. Knowing this audience made it so much easier to create and maintain a common theme for my tweets and relatable content. 

 

One thing I thought was pretty cool about tweeting each day about social media or our online habits was that a lot of my followers not from the class started to engage with the content and even reply. It showed that people do use the platform for information seeking and do find the more educational content interesting at times. This showed me that people outside of your social media community can still engage with it or even join it if they find the content interesting. #cnusocialmedia was definitely a social media community, especially once we all started to reply to each other about halfway through the semester and engage in polls and trends. I realized pretty fast where I fell short in how I interacted online. I am terrible at retweeting others content. Although I favorite it all the time and even reply, I was so bad at retweeting and I think it is just because it was an online behavior I rarely did unless the tweet was a viral one. I’ve tried to think about why this was a behavior I was not used to and I think it may be because this is not an action you use on any other platform and I usually like keeping my social media accounts full of my own content. However, I had to get over this and start retweeting my classmates tweets, especially because a lot of them went along with my own. 

  

Tweeting every day on my personal account was actually a great exercise for me, especially because I’ll be working with social media after graduation. It showed me how important it is to constantly post content if you want to be a part of an online community and have your own voice heard. Although the task was difficult at times and I felt like I didn’t always have original or exciting content, the act of being present on social media, in an informative or educational way, taught me a lot. This task also showed how much we really do learn from social media and that we can connect on social media about any topic, not just the funny or entertaining ones. 

Overall, I think as the semester went on I got a lot better at this assignment. Like I said, at first, I felt a little weird tweeting daily and somewhat annoying to my followers but once people started engaging with my tweets I gained confidence. I think that this behavior is how we are on social media platforms no matter what. Maybe that is part of the socialization process of learning a new platform. Although twitter was clearly not a new platform for me, being this active definitely was. I felt like I made a lot of progress with how I engaged with others and the content I posted. I think I deserve an 85% on this assignment because like I said, I did fall short on retweeting content on a weekly basis. Even though I engaged with others, I realized that favoriting and retweeting does not accomplish the same goal and retweeting actually grows the online community. This assignment taught me a lot about the importance of information seeking online as well and that people do in fact use platforms like twitter to do this. I ended up having fun tweeting on a daily basis and liked seeing what my classmates had to say, I also loved when we would share links and videos because I actually learned a lot more and could find some really interesting information on social media trends or new additions to apps/platforms.

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

Thanks for a great semester, I had a ton of fun in this class and I hope you have an amazing time in Athens! I’m so glad I got to take two of your classes in my last semester at CNU.