Today I wanted to focus on what I've been trying to figure out for the past few months; what in the world do people talk about on twitter, and why? I'm not sure there is a true answer to this question. I'll start by looking at the top trends for Twitter today.... which is #nicknamespeoplehaveforme. Why people are interested in knowing nicknames of OTHER people is completely beyond me. But it does point out to me that Twitter is not just used for getting information and feeling closer to celebs (like I initially believed), but it's always a space to talk about total nothingness and read about total nothingness and to be potentially entertained by it. Therefore, I conclude (even though there is no conclusion to this) that people use twitter for three things (in order of importance) 1. talking about random/nothingness to be entertained 2. to follow, learn about, feel closer to celebs and 3. to connect with people they actually know.
2 months in and I'm still far from addicted to it, by the way! (Ok... Will Ferrell's is funny!)
It's cool that you've been proactive in learning about what Twitter really is. For Comm 272 we needed a Twitter to post reading questions, but I haven't done too much outside of that on the site. I was always interested about how the topics started and how quickly the trends changed. Good luck with the rest of your project.
ReplyDeleteCurrently, I am not a member of Twitter (because I don't think I can afford to spend anymore time on social networking sites than I already do...). However, I have discussed it in a lot of classes and have several friends that use it, so I've learned a little bit about it in the past year. I definitely agree that people use Twitter for following celebrities and for randomness, but I've also learned that people often use Twitter as a news source. A lot of people follow trends about politics and current news topics. For example, the people of Egypt use Twitter as a source of communication during the crisis in January. I'm not sure exactly how common the use of Twitter is as a news source, but just an interesting side note that some people do use it for this...
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