Blog #8

Tweeting (almost) Everyday 

For A Semester

 What exactly is a tweet? Well, “Its short message length (140 characters), and one-way connections (‘following’ rather than ‘friending’), lead themselves effectively to random and regular updates on almost any form of personal or professional activity” (Harrington et al., 2013). I have had a Twitter since I was ten years old. My main purpose of getting one was to tweet Justin Bieber, and that was literally all I used it for up until I was about 14 and realized Justin Bieber was not my type. I started using twitter like a normal teenage girl would. Tweeting anything that came to my mind. Never would I have thought that I would be taking a college class based on social media, nor did I ever think that I would have to use a social media platform everyday for a grade. At the beginning of the semester, I thought tweeting everyday for class was going to be easy, because I already get on Twitter everyday without being told that it is for a grade. Even though I do not actually create tweets, getting on Twitter to look at other tweets is one of the first things I do when I wake up in the morning. So how hard could it be to tweet everyday for class?? Boy was I wrong.

Facing the Challenges

The first three weeks of tweeting everyday went great, but heading into the fourth week, my other classes started to get busier with work and I noticed that on some days I started to almost forget to tweet for that day. So I had to make myself a reminder on my phone to tweet at 3:00 pm every day. You would think this would make my life a lot easier but it did not. There would be some days when 3:00 would hit, I would get my reminder to tweet, go on twitter, and just sit there and stare at my screen with a blank mind. Coming up with things to tweet about, that also related to the topic of social media was a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. I did catch myself multiple times repeating tweets that I had previously tweeted, or saw someone else in the class tweet. Thinking of my own content to post was a challenge that I faced way before it was mandatory to tweet for this class. On my personal twitter account I am very hesitant when it comes to posting my own opinion about different topics. So being thrown into something you are not comfortable with and then the added stress of being graded on it was not an easy task for me, and had me sending screenshots of my tweet ideas to my mom to make sure that they made sense. It was like I had some sort of anxiety when it came to posting my own content.

Another challenge that nobody expected to have during this time, was switching to the online platform due to the coronavirus. Having to look at a screen all day for school work caused me to begin to drift away from anything that had to do with a screen. This caused the whole tweeting everyday experience to become less of a fun experiment and more of an everyday casual homework assignment. Another reason the coronavirus made this experience difficult, is because at one point information about the virus was all that was spreading around social media platforms, especially twitter. For about a week, the reactions to how the coronavirus was taking over our everyday lives and taking over social media was all that I saw on our class twitter timeline.

The Fun Of Tweeting

Like I previously mentioned, when it comes to my regular social media accounts, I am very hesitant when voicing my opinion about topics. Due to this exercise of having to
tweet everyday it has pushed me to step out of my comfort zone, and now I actually enjoy creating my own tweets. “While anyone can potentially read or view a digital artifact, we need a more specific conception of audience than ‘anyone’ to choose the language, cultural referents, style, and so on that comprise online identity presentation” (Marwick & boyd, 2010). Being able to post tweets that only my classmates will see and understand, created a safe place for me to get used to creating and posting my own content since I was fully aware of my audience. Another thing I enjoyed was being able to interact with my classmates who I would have probably never interacted with in person (introvert problems).  “Twitter becomes a metaphorical ‘watercooler’ in the cloud, but one where the watercooler conversations take place instantly, rather than at work the following morning” (Harrington et al., 2013). When we participated in the live tweeting session of Scandal because we were not able to meet in person, this was a perfect example of the "watercooler" metaphor.
Showing my mom my tweets before I tweeted them also started a lot of interesting conversations between us. Everyday I would go to my mom and say “do you wanna hear the tweet of the day?” and there were days where we would start a very interesting conversation that was based off my tweet and it would really get us thinking about technology and how it affects our lives. My most favorite thing of tweeting was being able to interact with Dr. Bernabo easily. Going on Twitter to see random tweets from her about deciding how she does not want to use the textbook anymore, or asking us if we want to continue the group projects or not. I respect her a lot for that because she kind of got to our level of communication that she knows this generation is most comfortable with.

What I Learned: 

The most important thing that I learned from this experience is that I was not made to be a social media influencer. Posting content to a wide range of audience and keeping them entertained is very overlooked when influencers do it and call it a job, but I definitely see how it is a job. I found it a lot of work to post content everyday to one social media platform. Imagine having to post multiple times a day to multiple social media platforms. Better yet, also keeping your audience in mind, and to keep coming up with ideas that will keep them entertained. It is difficult to keep coming up with new content that is a relatable topic to a certain audience, in this case, my classmates and the topic of social media. When it comes to the audience of a social media influencer, the diversity of it could be all over the place, so they have to keep everyone in mind when they are deciding what content is best for them to post.

Where I Fell Short:

Interacting with other classmates tweets was difficult for me. Only because I was nervous that I would come off rude when I was commenting my opinion on something. People are not able to tell the tone of voice of someone over the phone, and I did not want to offend anyone. If I could go back and change the way I looked at things, I would change the way I only really analyzed my social media usage and how I used it to how others use social media. I based my tweets off of my analyzation of how i use social media, and did not really look at how everyone used social media. Which leads me to my next point, I really fell short in reading my own choice of articles that analyze how others use social media.

Overall, I am going to miss tweeting everyday for this class. I have gotten in such a habit of it, that I would even have anxiety on weekends that I felt like I was forgetting to tweet for the day, but then would realize that it is not a week day. Based on the guidelines laid out on the syllabus, I would give myself the numerical score of a 90 (I did miss one day because I went to bed at 5pm and did not wake up until 12:30am). Going to be very weird not tweeting on that account, but will continue to have anxiety for about the next week or so because I will feel like I am forgetting something.

sources:
Highfield, T., Harrington, S., & 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