Why You Should Be on Twitter

By Chuck Tryon, AlterNet. Posted March 4, 2009.

And, yes, many tweets entail banal references to a need for more coffee or boredom at reading yet another stack of student papers, but there is something to be appreciated in sharing in the routines of everyday life with friends and colleagues, and even complete strangers across campus, across town or thousands of miles away.

I may be over-romanticizing a bit by connecting Twitter to Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," which he associated with readers picking up their morning newspapers over breakfast and recognizing that others in their town, and even nearby towns, were doing the same thing. Every time I check my Twitter feed, I'm able to share in the enjoyment of daily routines and rituals: a warm cup of coffee, a long run through the park, a good episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Twitter isn't the only tool that can provide that, but if you look at an individual tweet, you miss the fact that my description of my morning run is responding to someone else's. In this regard, it's worth noting that these articles rarely, if ever, quote a tweet with an "@someone," which pretty much misses one of the defining uses of Twitter as a communication tool. According to my Twitter stats, nearly half of my tweets are replies, suggesting that the genre functions less as a broadcast and more as a conversation.

But one of the biggest misunderstandings of Twitter is the argument that the practice of writing in 140-character chunks suggests that we are thinking in the same bite-sized bits. Yes, Twitter sometimes requires me to engage in some linguistic cartwheels to distill something down to 140 characters, but arguably that's a sign of creativity and facility with language, not a decline in good grammar.

In addition, this assumes that language -- what is written in a tweet, a blog post, or any text for that matter -- is identical to thought, a pretty reductive view of how thought and language interact.

Second, it views Twitter in isolation from other media. Many tweets make reference to other texts, whether films, TV shows, blog entries, newspaper articles. Twitter, in that context, can supplement larger conversations. My decision to link to Zaitchik's article, in fact, sent at least a half-dozen readers over to see what was fueling my barely caffeinated ire so early on a Saturday morning, while many of my "followers" challenged me to defend my complaints more rigorously.

This sense of community is also reflected in the various memes that circulate on Twitter, some lasting several hours, others lasting several days. In fact, the "backflick" meme, in which Twitterers describe the plots of popular movies in reverse, is a great example of creative intertextuality that can take place in these short status updates.

Thus, "W is about a president who becomes an alcoholic and a coke addict." Or my contribution: "Bonnie and Clyde: benevolent kids donate money to failing banks, return stolen cars to rightful owners." Again, it's a form of community building, a quick way to share with others a self-indulgent love of movies in a pretty clever way, this time with a slight political edge.

Many others have already pointed out the political uses of Twitter. The Barack Obama presidential campaign famously used Twitter as a tool for organizing voters. More recently, a number of other politicians, including Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have used Twitter to broadcast elements of their policy views and personal lives.

But while these uses may be fascinating by themselves, they help to obscure Twitter's status as a conversational, rather than broadcast, medium and one that can help to facilitate real-world interactions.

This potential use for Twitter became vividly clear for me when I attended the first of several local "Tweetups" here in Fayetteville, N.C., where I live and teach. The "Tweetup" brought together several locals who are interested in social media, where we could exchange ideas and discuss shared interests, many of which extended well beyond the computer screen. These online networks don't supplant existing communities. Instead, they provide a useful supplement to conversations that we're already having.

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Chuck Tryon is an assistant professor of English at Fayetteville State University and is the author of the forthcoming book Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Digital Convergence (Rutgers University Press). He also blogs at the Chutry Experiment, and he invites readers to follow him on Twitter.

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