Twitter and Me (Blogs and Wikis Reflection)

The most important thing that Weblogs and Wikis did for me?  It got me really into Twitter, and I've realized how useful it can be if used correctly.

Critics create an account with a Facebook frame of mind, look at Twitter and think, "Hm, status updates and that's it?  What's the big deal?"  That's what I thought when I first made an account in the summer of 2010.  I searched for me friends and discovered that only a few had a Twitter account, and if they did there was a good chance it was abandoned.  So, I basically abandoned my own account for a couple of months.  I hadn't discovered my use for it yet.

Along came Weblogs and Wikis, and I was forced to become a real member of the Twitter world.  I logged into my account after having to press the "forgot password?" button and saw that I had only tweeted once.  It read, "Test tweet."  After a few days I discovered a use for Twitter, and it is still my primary use: News.  Following the right people and organizations on Twitter has become my favorite way to follow the news.  I can turn on CNN or go to the Strib's website and get the latest headlines.  But that's according to what that organization is covering -- very limiting.  With Twitter, I can get constant updates from any person or news source I decide to follow and, to me, that is the best way to stay informed.

On the other hand, I also produce tweets; I don't just consume.  For example, in the context of the classroom, I have put out a call or two about class meeting times and assignments.  Instead of searching through my phone's contacts to find someone in class to text, I can just compose a tweet, use #en3177, and everyone in class can see it and help me out.  I've also had a little bit of fun tweeting.  For example, last weekend I used my phone to tweet, "Wally the beer man sells beer at Sneaky Pete's AFTER Twins games now.  Oh how the mighty have fallen..."  As you may decipher from the context of the tweet, I had been at the Twins game, went to Sneaky Pete's afterward, and decided to tell my Twitter followers who I had discovered there.  I walked in, saw Wally, and tweeted my bit in well under a minute.  Isn't Twitter fun?

I see definite (possible) professional benefits with Twitter, even though my attempts at it have been fruitless.  When I was applying for summer internships, I made contact with an employer via Twitter.  I followed both the company and the editor in charge of reviewing applications.  I tweeted the following at one point: "Putting together an internship application for @Coffee_House_."  It was a way to make contact with them and let them know I'm here and interested.  I got a mention that said something along the lines of, "Yay, applications coming our way!"  Since Twitter is so new, and I am so new to it, I can't really place what exactly it means to get a mention.  But hey, if you cast out your line to a prospective employer in any medium and get a reply, it can't hurt.

Twitter isn't the only thing that will last for me from en3177, but it is definitely the biggest.  I created this blog, and I see myself using it to self publish over the summer.  Diigo can also come in handy, but since I do almost all of my browsing on this one machine, I have no real need for it.  But Twitter, well Twitter and me will be together for a long time.

Flash Mobs

I heard about flash mobs a few years ago, but I never did any research on them until now.  What I found was incredible.

Obviously, flash mobs are a product of advanced communication tools (txt, email, FB) that allow mass-messages to be sent in seconds.  It is hard to imagine a flash mob being organized by telegraph or over the phone.  I picture someone sitting down with a rotary phone and a list of a hundred people -- not gonna happen.  But now someone can create a Facebook group and invite the people they want in on the prank, or type up a txt message and send it to dozens of contacts.

I suppose I should define "flash mob."  It is a mob that comes seemingly out of nowhere, in a public place, and does something (usually) harmless and completely random.  The bystanders usually catch a good show, especially when the mob performs a dance, which seems to be the most popular type of flash mob.  Flash mobs can also pull off hilarious pranks, like this one that I found on Youtube:

Flash mobs are a great example of how the digital world can help us interact with the analog world.  People have been texting and emailing each other to make plans for years, and flash mobs are an extreme version of that act.

Reading up on these things makes me hope that some day soon I get a text message that invites me to be a part of one.

Technology and Language

Is modern technology (texting, twitter, the internet in general) changing language?  The answer is yes, within those forms.  Many people don't use complete sentences when composing a text message.  Character limits are one reason for this.  A Twitter post is confined to 140 characters, and to fit a particular message into that, without spilling into a second post, people make sacrifices.  For example, people use shorthand techniques like w/ for the word "with" and the abbreviations made popular by text messaging, like OMG and WTF.

Comment fields on Youtube and other sites are a great place to look if you want to believe that the English language is deteriorating, as well as civility.  These comment fields are basically a mixture of personal attacks written with poor grammar.  An inevitably, at some point, someone will point out another's poor grammar and be called a "Grammar Nazi."  The comments field on Youtube for the video entitled "Slash Solo Godfather Theme" is a perfect example.  The first page is filled with personal attacks such as "Dumb bitch."  And almost nobody capitalized the first letter of a sentence.  But hey, it's the comment field under a guitar solo video, so...

One more interesting thing I found was This page from PBS about language changes over time, mainly verbal.  There is some very interesting stuff in there, like where language changes originate, and what television's role is in language changes.  

Privacy Manifesto

There is a lot of debate regarding online privacy.  Should everything online be private?  Should it all be wide open, with everyone's information everywhere?  Well, I would say there is a medium to those two extremes.

People need to choose what they want others to see online, and implement their own privacy plan accordingly.  If we make everything private, across the board for everyone, then all internet users will be anonymous.  Many people don't want to be anonymous, and the ones who are tend to be a nuisance in comment fields.

What we do to solve this problem is let everyone control their own privacy.  Something along the lines of what Facebook did with their privacy policy.  Whether or not those privacy settings are being properly implemented by the folks at Facebook is one thing, but the concept is what I'm interested in.  And you don't need buttons to click that say "make this private," you can just do it on your own by deciding what to put online.  For example, I deleted my Facebook.  When I do a general name search for myself on Google, the results are not me.  That's mainly because I don't have a Facebook page.  Same goes for image searches.  I untagged all of the photos I was in on Facebook and dragged them into a folder on my computer.  That's privacy.  I can look at them at my leisure, and people I don't know aren't gazing at them.

The example I just gave basically sums up my Privacy Manifesto.  Take your life into your own hands, and consider who's reading your information and clicking through your photos before you click "post." Maybe you just don't care who knows everything about you, and if you're that care-free then more power to ya.

Social Media and the Japan Quake

My group looked at a lot of Twitter posts under the tag "#Japan" and found some interesting things.

Many people are using Twitter to get the word out about fundraising efforts.  Promoting the Red Cross fundraising efforts via text message is a very common occurrence.  Along the same lines, there are a lot of people offering prayers and thoughts for the victims.  On the opposite end of that spectrum, there are (of course) some rude and negative comments.  Some people apparently feel the need to make jokes or out-of-line comments.  The worst part about these is that they are put in the same bin under the Japan hash tag.

Twitter is also being used to get out information to various groups of people in Japan.  One interesting thing I found was the use of the US Army's Twitter account in the hours after the quake and tsunami and earthquake.  They used their Twitter account to reach soldiers stationed in Japan regarding evacuation procedures.

There are a lot of links to news reports on Twitter as well.  In that regard, looking through the tweets is a very useful tool to simply find out what is happening in Japan.  However, some people have posted some inaccurate information about the situation.  Our group discussed the thought that a person may misunderstand something they see on the news, and then take to Twitter with inaccurate statistics.  That can be troublesome for people using Twitter to consume news.

What I've Done

The following is a list of what I have done thus far in my Weblogs and Wikis class (the reason I have this blog in the first place).  I'm sure that after writing this list I will have a minor panic attack and realize that I need to get my act together.  But maybe that's the point of the assignment.

1. I dusted off my Twitter account, and now I'm fully addicted to it.

2. I created this blog, which I have basically abandoned.  The tab stares at me and makes me feel guilty every time I open Chrome.

3. I created a Diigo account, and I have bookmarked things here and there.  One article cemented my idea to delete my Facebook account.  I made a blog post about it, and a week or so later, I actually deleted it.

4. I've bookmarked the required class readings on Diigo.

5. I also bookmarked a cool video on Mpls/St. Paul that I intend to do something with at some point, but for now I just want people to see it.

6. I made a blog post about the issues surrounding blogging and literature, as well as blogging and journalism.  I didn't really come to any groundbreaking conclusions, though.

7. I realized that I'm not as computer-savvy as I thought.

8. Wikis aren't my thing.

Here's an organized look at what I've done with/think about the components of the class:

Where I've Been (and where I'm going)

Blogging and My Future Career(s)

In the Spring of 2012 I will be entering the real world; searching for a job and living in my parents' basement.  I'll be looking for a career working with words, whether in the literary publishing field or the journalism route.  Needless to say, these two fields are very often mentioned in the same sentence as blogs.

People say that publishing on a blog isn't really publishing, and bloggers aren't journalists.  However, blogs are changing journalism and publishing, and no one would deny that.

Here, a blogger at successful-blog.com debates whether a blog can be literature: http://www.successful-blog.com/1/blogging-as-literature-why-not/ but I would rather think about what a blog can mean to someone who is looking to launch a literary career.  A blog offers a writer a place to get their work out into the world.  Instead of sending a short story or poem directly to a literary magazine, a writer can post it on their blog and see what people think about it.  It's a better version of handing a manuscript to a friend and asking for feedback.  People will be more honest online, since they likely don't know the writer and can hide behind the veil of anonymity.  Real, honest feedback is so important to a writer, and a blog's comment field is a great place to get that feedback.

As for blogging and journalism?  Most journalists have their own blogs now, so obviously there is something to it.  Print journalists can criticize home-body bloggers all they want, but at the same time they know it is changing the game.  Like a writer looking to be published, blogs can do the same thing for a beginning journalist or a freelancer.  Blogs are a free way to get your words and your name out to people.  Why not sell your article to a newspaper, and then publish it on a blog?  Thenextweb.com has a nice piece on the blogging vs. journalism debate: http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/08/18/blogging-vs-journalism-the-ongoing-debate/

On the verge of deletion

The time is almost here: the day I delete my Facebook.  It's something I've been planning to do for a couple of months, but somehow I still have an account.  I check it about once every two weeks, and all of my photos have been transferred to a file on my computer.  I'm not trying to make some anti-society point by deleting the account like some people.  I don't mind being a part of a huge commercial mass.  my reasons are more practical than that, and mostly stem from paranoia.

First, I fear that employers looking at my Facebook will see my as unfit to hold any sort of responsibility. Facebook has painted a slanted portrait of my life.  The only time I appear in photos is when I'm at a party.  I rarely find my way in front of a camera when I'm sober.  The result?  Looking through my Facebook pictures, someone would assume I was a sloppy drunk who does nothing but attend theme parties.  Instead of sorting through the photos and untagging the ones that have a beer in them, I'm choosing to delete my account.  Keeping it would leave me with about six photos and a list of friends, most of which I can hardly remember.

Second, I don't like my information being harvested and sold to advertisers.  I do have a Gmail account, and I know they do something similar.  However, my Gmail account doesn't have my interests listed, connected to photos of me.  The fact that people are extracting information from my life and analyzing it in order to sell products to me through increasingly invasive means really bothers me, and I'll choose not to participate.

Naming my blog

There are three steps in signing up for a blog on this site.  The second one -- naming your blog -- is a real challenge.  I overlooked the fact that I would have to name it, and when I was forced to do so I had a flashback.  It was about three years ago and I was sitting sitting in a garage about to draft my first fantasy football team.  Everyone else in the league had played the previous year(s) and already had a polished name.  What I came up with I would rather not mention, it was so stupid.  a couple of years later, I now have, in my opinion, the best team name in the league.

But naming this blog might have been worse than naming my first fantasy football team, except for the fact that I wasn't surrounded by eleven men loaded with beer and waiting for me to come up with something witty.  After looking at different sites that claim to be the guide to a perfect blog name, I ended up partially stealing a name from a list.  That blog is called "The Note," and I sat staring at the wall for ten minutes trying to find something similar.  What I came up with is not half as good, and I'm left wishing I had the power to steal that name.