Twitter

Twitter   

When you think of social networking you immediately think of Facebook and Twitter - well i do anyway, at the moment I am slightly obsessed with twitter: #serialtweeter.
As someone who is signed up to both of these sites, i can speak from experience of being involved in posting status', sharing photos and videos and 'tweeting' on a regular basis -i have been drawn into the world of social networking and its far too addictive. However it is not just me, engaging in these sites is becoming part of the daily routine for a huge proportion of the population today.

Although both Facebook and Twitter are similar in so many ways I'm going to focus on twitter as the topic of debate in my blog. Twitter is considered to be a form of 'micro-blogging' as there is a limit to the number of characters you can post at one time, where as with Facebook people can go on for pages writing about their life stories which can get a bit tedious.
You can write as many status' as you want throughout the day, which in the world of twitter are known as 'tweets' and there is no filter whatsoever on what you can talk about - the world is your oyster!

There are two symbols that you need to know about to get to grips with twitter; '@' and '#'.
The @ symbol is used to tag others in your tweets as it identifies your twitter account (@joeblogs), for example if you wanted to send a tweet to multiple friends at one time here's how it would look:

                              Hii @joeblogs @curlysue fancy going to the pub later?

this makes communication among friends especially, so much easier than having to ring everyone individually and it is then easy to have a multi-person chat.

You may have wondered earlier what I meant by '#serialtweeter'... let me explain. Within the world of twitter people use a hashtag (#) when talking about a specific topic, for example if on the odd chance i felt the need to tweet about a sociological issue, i could finish my tweet with '#sociology', this would then group my tweet with any other tweets that have been tagged with #sociology, effectively making it easier for anyone who was interested in this topic to click on and access tweets on this topic much easier. For example this is what would happen:

I searched for '#sociology' and as you can see the application itself sieve's through millions of tweets and refines all sociological related posts by people, saving a researcher for example, a lot of hassle.
This is one of the many pro's to twitter for academic use, however you can also do this for any topic that interests you, like if you wanted all the gossip on one of your favourite programmes that you had missed you could just search #Eastenders and you would be up to date in no time.
When such subjects have been paired with a #, if they then become really popular on the twitter news feed, with millions of people tweeting about them, then they become known as a 'trending topic'.

I personally think that twitter is a good form of social networking because as well as keeping in touch with friends and family (if they have an account obviously) you can keep up to date with goings on in the world, be it having a nosey into the lives of celebrities and catching up on the latest gossip or even tracking the news networks for the latest breaking news stories as the majority of them have a twitter account these days that is constantly being updated. 

Ryan (2011) defines a social network to be 'a group of people coming together for a specific reason', that share common interests and behaviours, therefore twitter is an obvious example of what it is to be a social network. Engaging in conversations among friends on twitter can be seen as an online social network and especially with the use of hashtags, peoples common thoughts and interests are joining together to create larger social networks with multiple people whom might not necessarily know one another.

As well as being an outlet for escapism, recreation, research and a news feed twitter is often used as a marketing tool for business and has made the advertising and promoting of products and services so much easier for business to carry out as well as broadened their audience. This is true at the moment of the tv advertisement for the mobile phone network 'three'. There is an animated advert on the tv of a dancing horse (that is hilarious might i add) and of constant discussion on twitter. It has been intentionally promoted with the attached hashtag of #dancingponydance for the purpose of twitter, so that when people catch on to this new craze (which they already have), they can tweet about it, benefiting the company with the media and public attention that they wanted. It is proving to be more of a common practice for business to promote through twitter - a very clever idea if you ask me!

This new found niche in marketing and promoting, leads us to think of the idea of flexible accumulation in a post modern society. It is argued that postmodernity commodifies all aspects of society including that of our personal lives and identity that we form through social networks including twitter. Harvey (1989) would say that the change from modernity to postmodernity, a shift away from a capitalist society if you like, means that advancements in technologies i.e. ICT and the internet mean that social networking sites such as twitter are important sources for attracting custom and achieving profits, which is exactly what the 'three mobile phone network' have set out to do. 

Although there are many ideas of what twitter can be used for or considered to be, it is ultimately a form of social networking that provides enjoyment and entertainment for many of the population and   is rapidly becoming even more of a popular method of communication.