I really want to like Twitter. I tend to be annoyed by people who complain about technology for the sake of having that funny I'm-young-and-crotchety-like-Janeane-Garofalo-get-it? thing. But I feel crotchety when I look at Twitter. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? It's just a little overwhelming to me. There is a lot of "inspeak" with hashtags, RTs, and personal dialogs made public.
To me, Twitter does seem like a good forum to share interesting news articles or to promote personal projects, and I'm all for following interesting people to share ideas with me! This week is the first time I have actively used a #hashtag to follow a group conversation, and I definitely got more out of being part of a group in sharing ideas. It was great to see classmates sharing articles over the course of last week. For the first time I felt like an "insider!" I guess what I really need to work on is honing in on the right people to follow and the right things to share.
The Twitter-er(?) I was most impressed with this week was Archives Info. Her tweets were really interesting and relevant to the field; she shared articles about digital humanities and new interesting heritage sites. I plan on continuing to follow her feed. The Tweeter (?) I was least impressed with was the Librarian in Black. This was disappointing because I really liked the content on her blog; it was engaging and I learned a lot. I learned from her Twitter account all sorts of useless information about her personal life. Definitely not someone I plan to follow after this week.
I think my feelings towards the Librarian in Black connected to the discussion we had in class last week. I think librarians can be clique-y. Reading the LIBs posts made me feel like I just didn't get it. Archives Info, on the other hand, made me feel like I was being brought into the discussion. I think this has something to do with why we as library students feel uncomfortable asking questions. It pushes us out of the clique and into the group of users. This is important to keep in mind in terms of how we treat non-info professionals. Respect and humility, my friends, respect and humility.
I definitely think Twitter isn't the kind of thing you can jump into and start using. You're right that it has its own jargon and conventions. I think it's especially confusing that not everyone chooses to use Twitter in the same way, so it's hard to sort out who you want to follow and how you want to interact with people, like you said.
ReplyDeleteGood point about the cliquey-ness of twitter. It definitely can create an in-group/out-group feeling, especially since you have to use certain lingo to make it work with 140 characters. I am still not convinced that it's worth it for me to be on it, but I'm going to stick around this summer and see.
ReplyDeleteI had never thought of the hastags as clique issue before. I always saw them as a way for when tweeting to make sure that the tweet was seen by people where it might otherwise get lost in a sea of banal triviality. As for the lingo and speak of the 140 characters I was watching a sports show where essentially in order to tweet a reporter had to greatly generalize a story from his own childhood and it caused a whole mess. In a an age when we are being taught as librarian to use less jargon maybe twitter simply does not have enough characters to really be good at always reaching out to the masses who might need longer explanations of issues.
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