auradis

Yesterday in journalism lecture, we talked about what Twitter means for the field of journalism. I couldn’t help but think about how stupid the conversation sounded.

I tweeted during the week. If you’d like to re-tweet that, you could. Who still hates Twitter? There’s an application called Tweety [Tweetie?]. I enjoy using programs like twurl.

Thanks for making us sound like morons [twits? twittards?], Twitter!

At the beginning of the semester, our teacher asked us to create our own Twitter accounts, which is why I have one. I’ve experimented with following different people, most of whom are friends, but also celebrities like Lady GaGa and Lily Allen. I stopped following Anderson Cooper and Ashton Kutcher because they update so often that anything else I was subscribed to got lost in the deluge of their hourly tweets. I started following Shaquille O’Neal after reading a story about how two people found him in a diner via his Tweets and how he was totally cool and personable, and he’s definitely interesting to follow even though I don’t even know what team he’s on.

A surprising number of my classmates voiced their dislike of Twitter, saying that they were uninterested in reading the mundane details of their friends’ lives, or that they already spend so much time online that they could not stand adding another source of information to sort through [teacher called this e-fatigue].

I, on the other hand, am happy to have another outlet. My core internet use consists of 5 sites: Gmail, Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, and more recently, Flickr. I like that Twitter is kind of like a Facebook status that less people will see — I feel free to be more dramatic or random, and can write things that I feel like I need to say but won’t raise inquiries or comments like a Facebook or Gchat status would [mostly because I know less people who use Twitter].

As for using Twitter as a journalistic device, I’m not sure. I definitely prefer to access news in other ways, but I’m sure that there is some way that news organizations could utilize Twitter to benefit themselves. I’m just not particularly interested in that solution.