Posts tagged with social.

Why I've become a Twit

Jennifer Gardy, February 12, 2009 at 10:22 AM

 

I have just become a Twit.


Well, technically I've become a "Tweep" - one of those people on Twitter - but I can barely bring myself to type a word as twee as Tweep, let alone vocalize it. So a Twit I shall be.


I'd previously thought of myself as a reasonably early adopter of technology .  My favourite plaything when I was 4 was our family's Commodore 64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64), at which I'd spend long hours playing Space Taxi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Taxi). By kindergarten I had become an ace Logo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)) programmer, able to guide my trusty turtle into drawing any regular polygon, and throughout school we had a series of Macs, in front of whose monochromatic glow I would sit for hours, trying to find Carmen Sandiego or making dot-matrix greeting cards in Print Shop (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop).  I was on the internet in 1994, had my first website by 1996, joined Friendster before "to Friendster" became a verb, left Friendster for MySpace at the first sign of a sinking ship, and left MySpace for Facebook when all the blinking pink sparkle graphics became too much.


But Twitter? I couldn't quite see the point of broadcasting 140-character status updates about the minutiae of my life to what I assumed would be an uninterested audience: 5:02 a.m. - Awoken by cat attempting to make love to the duster. 8:34 a.m. - Wonder how husband can pack a band's worth of gear into a van but can only manage to fit two dishes and a pot in the dishwasher. 9:02 a.m. - Prolonged work stoppage due to cat's placement of its butt between my face and the monitor and cat's refusal to move.
I finally caved this week, though, and became a Twit. It was partially my editor's fault - after having what seemed like the majority of my social circle badgering me to join Twitter for the last few years, his just happened to be the request that pushed me over the edge. Probably because he issues me paycheques whilst the rest of my social circle does not.


Mostly, however, I joined as a preventative measure. I live in fear of becoming a technodinosaur, and any web or gadget trend I fail to embrace, or at least half-heartedly attempt, brings me one step closer to being That Person. The one who types hunt-and-peck style.  The one who refers to their own computer as "the internet". The one who actually believed Ted Stevens when he said "the internet is a series of a tubes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes).
Just before my editor's plea for me to join the Twitter Army arrived in my inbox (or before it "downloaded to my internet screen" for any technodinosaurs that might be reading this), I was guest lecturing to a group of 4th-year microbiology students and it was there that I realized that even tech-savvy me is in real danger of being trampled by the next generation and their aptitude for computers, gadgets and Web 2.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0).


When I started my B.Sc. over a decade ago, taking notes in a 4-colour clicky pen and having a small ruler handy was considered the very height of technological sophistication. Professors lectured using markers and an overhead projector, and we checked our campus e-mail on Unix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix)  terminals in the library basement, using Pine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_(e-mail_client)) for e-mail and the text-only Lynx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)) for web browsing (yes, children, once upon a time the internet did not have pictures.)


These days, all but the most reluctant lecturers use PowerPoint or other slideware to deliver their lectures, while their students listen in what may or may not be rapt attention. It's hard to tell when you're up there, because the students' faces are all obscured by their laptops and, for all you know, they're probably on Facebook. Or Twitter (11:42 a.m. - OMG am in lecture with Gardy. She has a LOLcat in her slides! LOL! Kawai! ^_^ )


They share their notes electronically, organize virtual study groups, and use their social networking sites to organize and promote parties and other campus events. They hack their iPhones to capture video and record lecture snippets, which can then be shared with anyone who overslept and missed class, and next they'll probably be using their phone's GPS to track which campus pub their friends are at.


It's a different era now, and if you don't jump in and participate in all this Web 2.0 stuff, you and the other Facebook deniers, Twitter haters, and Flickr phobes risk being left behind, as was nicely pointed out by a recent slate.com article (http://www.slate.com/id/2208678/). Keeping abreast of these trends is especially important for anyone involved in teaching today's kids, as the last thing you want to see on your RateMyProfessors.com (http://ratemyprofessors.com/) entry is a review uploaded (probably by iPhone) by one of your students... "LMFAO. Dude is such a n00b. Overheads? tl;dr. WTF?"   And while you're translating that, I'm off to tweet 140 characters about wrapping up another column for the week.

Tagged with technophobe, networking, twitter, myspace, facebook, social, web-2.0 | Comments (60) |