Twitter: The right way of using it!

Zhao and Rosson (2009) found that people are using Twitter for a variety of social purposes, including keeping in touch with friends and colleagues; raising visibility of interesting things to one’s social networks; gathering useful information for one’s profession or other personal interests; seeking for helps and opinions; and releasing emotional stress. These motivations seem to be quite similar to purposes reported in studies of other social media for (e.g., IM, Blogs, and RSS). After more detailed research they found that many of their informants use Twitter to update others about interesting things happening in their personal lives. Does our desire to be considered important (Carnegie, 1936) motivate us to use Twitter, or is it just a way to stay in touch with people that we don`t see every day?

Twitter as RSS feed
Many people use Twitter to gather information for their work and other personal interests(Zhao & Rosson, 2009). They do this by, for example, following people they met at an event or researchers who post useful information about interesting developments. Many participants in this research (Zhao & Rosson, 2009) said that they rather tweet about interesting topics rather about daily routines.

The Brevity of Twitter, the 140-character limitation on text messages, is a good thing. This feature is forcing tweeters to be very straight to the point and concise, which saves the reader a lot of time. If the 140-character isn’t enough the tweet can contain a hyperlink, which will guide the reader to the  source. Twitter also offers many benefits for a company. Some people work in virtual working groups around the world and use twitter for knowledge sharing or use twitter to inform employees about the company activities. Tweets give also an impression about the tweeter; what are his interests, what about his knowledge, which people does he follow, who is following him, et cetera. This information could have a major influence on a manager’s decision to promote or hire someone.  

The socialness of social media [part 1]

Back in the old days, when everything was slower than a snail-climbing-a-90degree-hill-in-reverse, people who spent more than an hour on the computer was a nerd. A asocial creature, whiter than the moon due to a lack of sunlight, and equipped with glasses for sniper rifle accuracy.  I still wonder if the computer gave nerds those looks or if looks made them to be into computers…Nowadays, people who spend less than an hour on a computer is being labeled as an caveman and the typical computer user is a guy with supermodel looks and rocket science intelligence. I still wonder if this image began after photoshop and online dictionaries…

The first online networkers partied after sending a ‘ping’ to a computer in another room. Now, It is normal to network; to have countless online friends via web applications, text and video messaging applications, multiplayer games, and being part of online communities. We referrer to this phenomenon as ‘Social Media’. The term Social media is something like ‘green cars’; the only thing green on a car could be the color, spit, or mold; even the most ‘greenest’ car is more black then green, except in the eyes of business of course... Social media is as asocial as polluting cars.  Well, this is of course not the case, or is it?

In the next couple of digital papers I will try to display the other side of social media. I will start with a ‘social talk’ to draw a sketch of the scenery and in the later parts, color it with scientific studies on this topic.

Social media has become a psychological deadly weapon, whereas every creative guy can destroy someone’s live with just a few clicks; picture editing, video editing, writing scandals is literally child's play. There are tons of cases where people lose their jobs and relationships because someone found a inappropriate picture. I guess that you are thinking: ‘I don’t do that kind of silliness, that won`t happen to me’,  but someone with photo editing skills can make you change your mind, especially with all those nice picture you have uploaded on the internet...

‘Social media stimulates the ‘knowledge society’ of today’. If knowledge is ‘just enough information to impress people’ then YES, social media is a blessing, but if you have another understanding of the word knowledge then, yes, it’s a curse. Back in the old days, when everything was slower than… dejavu…People where knowledgeable or not. Today, this has changed to: ‘you can act or you can`t’. The most easiest example is politics. One-liners, sound bites, rehearsaled jokes have become the interface between the politics and the voters. People don`t vote for a person, but a image, an ‘supermodel’, which is created by people who know the politics, and especially behavior of voters, better than you and I. I don`t like writing nor reading so I will try to keep this paragraph as short as possible: ‘real knowledge is suffering due to oversimplified popular short messaging’. An advice for those who want to make people believe that they are smart: read only the salient parts of an article. If people question your statement just refer to the research ‘stay out the line of fire’. Like I do by referring to the video of Micha.

End of part 1

[It feels nice to kick the system, every ones in a while. I`m thinking of buying industrial metal headed shoes.]

The nonsense of Social media [intro]

I have to write a blog and try to get as many visitors as possible for my Business information technology course. Yeah, I can feel the knot in my stomach again. Thanks to money hungry organizations and wannabe interesting social media users my believe in upright social communication is unrecoverable damaged.

‘Pretending to be something you`re not’ is the line that flashes in my head every time I hear social media, bleh. The quite uncomfortable feeling rages through my body at moments when the letters t.w.i.t.t.e.r. are combined into one word.

In the next blogs I will try to explain my disliking of social media, with of course referring to scientific research[otherwise I will get known as a ‘social media hater’]. While blogging, I`m sure that some toes will be stepped on, but my mission is to change the behavior of the social media user, who pollute the internet with nonsense. Stop messages like ‘I think that I can see my nails growing’ or ‘I have to go to bed, early day tomorrow’.

I`m sure that I will make a lot of friends thanks to this blog…not. As long as people have a good time, laugh and quit polluting the internet with their useless data, I will be happy.

[Just in case: ‘Don’t think that all social media users are failing, some are quite interesting and manage to inspire a lot of readers! Don’t cheer to soon, most social media users fail, hard’]


Later,

Me