Twitter: Magic or Myth?

Our Comm 322 Twitter project was not my first experience Twitter. I’ve had an account for about a year now. I initially got onto the site to follow celebrities and musicians that I liked, after constantly hearing about their Twitter feeds and all of the things they were doing on Twitter. Twitter was blowing up, and I didn’t want to miss out (and yeah, many of my journalism classes were incorporating lessons on social media, and I was only on Facebook at the time).

Once I started tweeting, I realized that Twitter was allowing fans to actually communicate with their favorite celebrities or other role models (journalists, authors, business owners, etc.). If you tweet at your favorites incessantly enough, they may pick your particular tweet out of the thousands or millions they receive every day and respond, making you feel like they are your new best friends. I’ve been lucky enough to experience this. But my realization about the environment Twitter created was not a new observation. In an interview I conducted with Brad King, assistant professor of journalism who teaches classes in social media and has an extensive resume in the web and journalism worlds (He worked at MIT and for Wired magazine. Just saying.), before Biz Stone’s much-anticipated visit to BSU, I remember this particular quote: “Twitter is democratizing.” It puts us all on equal footing. No one is more/less accessible on Twitter. Sure, some people have hundreds of thousands of followers while others are struggling to break 40; but no one’s voice is louder than anyone else’s on your Twitter timeline.

This lesson took one more step during our Twitter project. Actually, I guess you could say it was more of a step back. While it was a great feeling to have people responding to my tweets or retweeting them during the project -- even people I didn’t know or follow -- I realized how massive the Twitterverse is and how hard it is to accomplish anything significant in it. Yes, Twitter might be democratizing and revolutionary and a fascinating new communication tool, but unless you are famous or want to spend 75 percent of your day working the keyboard, it’s hard to actually make a dent in the endless string of tweets being strung at any point in time. For me, it looks like Twitter will be more of a method for me to gather information than disseminate it myself. I may receive the occasional helpful or exciting tweet directed at me from a stranger or celebrity, but I only have actual conversations with people I am already friends with. When I first started using Twitter, the possibilities seemed endless and people seemed to be at my fingertips. I still find Twitter fun and valuable, don’t get me wrong, but I guess some of the magic has worn off.