Ries_Blog 8

Blog 8

Twitter was a bit of a new adventure for me. Having the class platform forced me to learn to use the features, understand the tones, and see how my peers use the site in what felt like a low-stakes experience. The daily tweets forced me to consider social media’s influence more than I typically would, in hopes that I could come up with a tweet that would be interesting or beneficial for my peers. There were days that were more informative than others, however, a majority of my tweets and the tweets of my peers helped me see a landscape that had previously not been on my radar.

When we started out, it was very difficult remembering to tweet every day. A few ended up being very close to the next day, but those were the days that ended up making me think more about articles to find or peers to respond to rather than focusing on simplistic opinions. I thought through what I was writing so that there was value in the experience, which did change from the normal semester to online work. My favorite aspect was being able to see and respond to other tweets from my peers. Once we got over the collective Bachelor phase, there were insightful, funny, and interesting tweets that I appreciated being privy too. I felt like I learned about the people behind the tweets even if I only knew three people in the class itself. When we had particularly engaging readings – post Fuchs of course – it was visible when the class enjoyed the topic by tweets that were relevant to class or the readings. I liked being able to engage after the discussion in a simple way that somehow did not involve being stressed about class performance. I also appreciated having a direct line of communication to Dr. Bernabo as it helped make her (you?) more approachable, while also using it as a tool for connecting readings and articles. Somehow, she was the only one who really shared memes, but they helped for sure.

In my own tweets I attempted to ensure that I was “maintaining authenticity” in the opinions stated or things that interested me (Marwick & Boyd, 2010, pg. 114). I think Twitter loses value when there is too much of a front being put on – that is for Instagram put it away on Twitter. My “personal branding” then became focused around what I re-tweeted instead of only what I was tweeting myself (Marwick & Boyd, 2010, pg. 114). In the same way that I wanted my tweets to have some value, I wanted what I re-tweeted to fit into the discussions as well. This made me read more carefully, think about the ten re-tweets and who would be included in that, and how other people would perceive it. While this was not something I thought of every day of the semester, it was definitely a consideration when I could make it. The hardest part in maintaining that authenticity was when I went to share articles or news reports that were relevant. You never know people’s opinions, and some were more political than others which made me nervous. I have made a point to not let politics get onto my Facebook, but Twitter for class was different in the necessity of posting some of them. None of my fears really came back up once I posted, but each time I found an article that could have been good for the class I really thought about other people’s opinions before sharing.

For some reason, even in class I thought about the other people more than I considered most other factors. What makes me annoyed is that I legitimately don’t know a majority of the class and I was still worried for some reason. On my other social media platforms, I know about 95% of the people I follow, and yes in those scenarios I care about what I’m posting because it’s to family and friends. In this experience though – why was it so easy for me to stress out about what other people thought? I still have not been able to bring myself to tweet on my non-class Twitter because there seems to be pressure still. That needs to go away somehow.

I think this experience of everyday tweets was exhausting, encouraging, interesting, and lackluster all in the span of a few months. Some days – I wanted nothing to do with a class Twitter. Other days – I wanted more people to post so I could respond! I think there was positives more days than negatives – and more encouragement than nothing. Most tweets were engaging, and I often found myself researching more about what they had posted about. I would go back to polls a few hours after to see if my vote panned out the way I thought it would. People shared about their experiences and shared what they found interesting, none of which would have happened most likely on a ‘real’ Twitter. While there were days, I found one too many tweets about not wanting to do online classes for the day, the motivation and tips would come out the next day to combat and show positivity. This experience was informational, and I do think I will be keeping my ‘real’ Twitter – despite my better judgement. I’m keeping it in the hopes that there will still be some educational value, I know it’s in there somewhere – I just have to find the people who won’t judge me for my posts, won’t give themselves too much of a brand, and will let me continue to trial and error these platforms until I get the hang of it. @cnusocialmedia was an experience for sure, and I think I’ll mute the Bachelor before the next season.

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

95/100 – Tweets were daily, hopefully informative and stayed relevant to course content.