Twitter: I do not know

I keep coming back to Twitter. After less than a year using it, I am still wondering about it. It is just random no-sense; it is the broadcasting of trivial information; it is a place for quick conversations; it is a news center; it is becoming a PR tool for companies; and so on. It is many things and navigating all of them can be difficult. In my case, I am following more than 250 people: many news organizations and journalists; some people in Bogotá (Medellín and other parts of Colombia); some people in London connected to the Guardian (or it seems); entrepreneurs with interest in social network tools; and random people here and there who broadcast little pieces of their lives. In some cases, I reply to some of them and they reply back——in one case, we started a conversation and it suddenly came to a stop: this follower never replied back yet did not block me; we are still following each other but do not participate in conversations. I do not have a clue about what happened. In another case, I replied back and to this day we engaged in little conversations. I really do not know where Twitter is going (it does not matter) and do not know where I am going paying attention to it. I like how I get informed about things not just about news but about websites, recipes, ideas, ways of saying things, and so on. Yet I am not sure about it. I am not sure.

Twitter and Academics

I have been using twitter (a micro-blogging tool) for almost six months or so. I am following a number of people connected to particular areas of interest: a group of journalists, a group of Colombians (in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), a group of newspapers, a group of social-network entrepreneurs (or whatever they call themselves), a group of postgraduate students; a group of moms working from home, a group of people connected to NASA and other space programs (in Europe), and one or two singers and actors. I have learned to enjoy the conversations that take place on twitter: I get information (from newspapers and journalists) and I get to hear conversations about politics, cooking, teenagers, lack of inspiration for this or that, and about working projects in Bogotá.

I wonder why there are not more people from the academic world using it. It could be that I have not looked well in twitterland but so far I have only found a couple of people in journalism schools not body in history (my area). When I first began interested in twitter, I sent an email to a group of colleagues in history: two of them opened accounts but they stopped using it few days later. I could not convince my colleagues to use it (not that I tried hard: I myself did not know how to use it) but my sense is that very few people in the academy is using it. I think it could be a great tool to connect people in our areas of expertise to twitte about the books we are reading, the problems we are having with our writing, or just about our lives in the classroom, and outside. Perhaps in a year or so the circle will start to include those in the academic world.