Monday, May 19, 2008

Twitter Moment, Twitter Events

A "Twitter Moment" is an ordinary moment that becomes interesting and public by blogging it; or it is just an ordinary moment that becomes public. Whatever it is, a twitter moment is now a temporal category. I am intrigued by Twitter. I began a week or so ago: I opened my account after reading about a professor who used it in his class. I thought I would give it a try during the Summer and then, perhaps, try it in my seminars in the Fall. Here I am experimenting with Twitter. Most people I have asked about it in my circle of friends and co-workers do not know about it (some have heard about it but nobody knew anything concrete about it), so I am following complete strangers. I am following about 30-something people: I decided to follow people involved in computer and social network activities (investors, journalists, entrepreneurs) to get a sense of what is going on in that part of the world; I follow also people in Colombia (Bogotá) and in California (Bay Area), two areas to which I am particularly attached to; and I am also following journalists and professors (but I have not found many professors yet).

After my short experience with Twitter I can say two things about it. First, Twitter breaks the hierarchies and the borders between people and groups. I am now "listening" to conversations among journalists, entrepreneurs, computer and social networking people, people living in Colombia, California, and Spain. Twitter erases, somehow, the professional and geographical barriers as well as the social, economic, and cultural, and age fences among groups and individual people. Perhaps this is what fascinates me about Twitter. Second, twitter moments and events lack context. It is hard to follow some of the conversations because there is no context in most of the postings. Perhaps making sense of some of the postings would be a matter of learning, for the reader, how to interpret them, and for the author, how to provide clues for the context.

Twitter takes the leveling of the field a step further because it creates a "place" for conversations beyond our disciplines, professions, geographical locations, age, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. This is the direction of social networking——and I am not an expert.

Digg this

No comments: