Sowalla - Blog 8

Our semester-long tweeting assignment was a very new challenge for me. I had never used Twitter extensively before, and wasn’t used to the posting style of the website.

One of my greatest struggles with this assignment was simply remembering to tweet! Since I wasn’t in the habit of using Twitter every day, I didn’t always have the reminder of my classmates tweets to spur me on to Tweet. Eventually, I got to the point where most nights it would become part of my nightly routine to wonder if I’d Tweeted yet that day, but this didn’t help me much on nights where I stayed up past midnight. Sometimes I would add Tweeting to my to-do list. However, since I delete items on my to-do list as soon as I do them, I would have to remind myself to add Tweeting back to the to-do list the next day. Fortunately, I was much better at completing the retweeting part of the assignment. I thought it was fun to scroll through my classmates’ tweets and retweet and that stood out to me as particularly interesting or relatable.

When I did remember to tweet, I believe I did a good job sticking to the guidelines on the syllabus. My tweets were always related to social media in some way. Many of my tweets were written in question format, encouraging responses from other students. At least 3 or 4 times, my tweets were responses to other students. I also voted on many of the surveys my classmates posted.

One way I could have improved my tweets would have been to vary the type of tweet I posted every now and then. I don’t think I ever went out of my way to find a post, article, or other piece of media to link to. Another thing I could have done would be to respond to my classmate’s tweets more often, as opposed to just retweeting. It would have contributed to the community atmosphere and put me in conversation with my classmates more.

Speaking of which, one of my favorite parts of the tweeting assignment was when I would see my classmates interacting and have the chance to interact with them. I could always count on seeing a few interesting, substantive tweets whenever I saw that people were responding to a post; it indicated that the original post had been insightful and thought-provoking. It makes sense that the social part of social media would be the most fun – after all, that’s what social media was designed to be.

It was always interesting to see when many people would post about the same topic. Sometimes it would be because many of us were responding to our class readings or assignments. This would help me remember what assignments I had to do and encourage me to do them, since they must be interesting if people are tweeting about it. Other times, people would post about the same thing because something in the world/the news/on social media had caught all of our attentions. For example, many people, including myself, Tweeted about coronavirus as it became a larger threat and started to affect our lives.

My favorite day of the Twitter assignment was probably the day we posted live tweets while watching Scandal. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would, having initially worried that I would have trouble thinking of things to tweet and posting tweets before the moment of their relevance had past. I realized that, when I relaxed and focused on my immediate reactions to scenes, I was able to get into the assignment and enjoy my classmates tweets as I posted my own. This was probably the time where I felt most engaged with the online community our class had formed. As Harrington, Highfield & Bruns (2013) stated, “For audiences with access to social media on a second screen, the experience of watching television thus becomes an even more communal one.”

If I were to grade myself on a 50-point scale, I would probably start by dividing this scale into 25 points for retweets and 25 points for original tweets. I did pretty well consistently with the retweets, so I’d give myself a full 25 points for that. The original tweets are a little more complicated, since I’m not sure exactly how often I forgot about these… Maybe 1-2 days each week? The tweets I did remember were usually thoughtful, so I’d give myself credit for that. How about 18 points for the original tweets? That makes a total score of 43. Not perfect, but a solid B.

That being said, I might be giving myself too much credit on how many tweets I remembered to make… Hopefully my memory wasn’t as bad as I think it may have been!

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