Twitter C/D

http://eggsbacon.co.nz/twitter_mau

Marjorie Scardino, who joined their board in Dec 2013, has made three tweets since.

https://mobile.twitter.com/marjscar/tweets

lol

lol "@TheEconomist"

I'd start a new account if I joined twitter, i think. I already have separate ones for different purposes.

Simon Amstells tweets are very, erm, informative

"hello xxxx people, thank you"

repeat.

http://www.mountainsofmouthness.com/

Replacement of Discover (which was mostly people i don't follow tweeting about things that were broadly relevant to my interests) with "tailored" hashtag sidebar is so awful. Currently have three tags about Kate Middleton, two #makeamovie... trends, and tags about the Philippines netball team / domestic Indian real estate legislation. Essentially, unless the fairly limited number of people i follow are saying anything, it's not worth using the site at all.

Hardly ever explore hashtags...its mostly ever good for keeping up with people and events.

Following a couple of campaigners, that's a whole other story but I wonder how effective these things are. Which is no reason NOT to do them of course.

Personally you get to say things in bite-sized chunks which are good to expunge off your mind. Or you can be as banal as you like. Appreciate the space.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/president-obama-joins-twitter-wave-of-hate-filled-racism-and-vitriol-ensues/article24560745/

twitter is a complete dud. i wish it would disappear. like someone said in the g&m comments, it especially tends to attract shallow commentary and encourage short attention span

But shallow commentary and short attention span are my specialties!

counterpoint: twitter is the most important invention of the 21st century

Counterpoint: Twitter is good

twitter is extremely good and cool

it especially tends to attract shallow commentary and encourage short attention span

it's true, you can't find such things anywhere else on the internet

remember 20 years ago when people complained about "soundbites" ruining culture? yeah

100 people have chosen to follow my micro-posts about turds and pee, if that isn't great i don't know what is

All I know is that thanks to Twitter, I can make whatever stupid jokes I want and Chuck D will see them.

twitter is good

it would be nice if most of it were well-intentioned, but it amplifies people's worst side

it especially tends to attract shallow commentary and encourage short attention span

it's true, you can't find such things anywhere else on the internet

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Friday, May 22, 2015 6:46 PM (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
i'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the point was that twitter forces this concept, unlike, for example, this message board, which has no character limit

way too many characters around here tbh

i joined a few months ago, a lot of folks in my field use it and i've found it fun to engage w/ colleagues and share ideas in a loose way

I've been on twitter since 2008 or so, but never really figured out how to use it well. I read it a few times a week, but probably only tweet something a few times a year. I've gone through phases where I've followed irl friends, ilxors, professional colleagues, weirdos, brands, activists, and I kinda hate the resultant paste.

I mostly respond to other ilxors with bad jokes

hey ∞, do you use twitter? i am curious. i always thought that concern over the forced character limit was one of those things that evaporates upon use, or for whichever other reasons is just exclusively held as a kind of theoretical objection. like your cousin-in-law says it after dinner during the holidays - Well!, I don't know how much you can say using [cites wrong number of characters] - & you have to just be like yeah Richard I don't know what to tell you it just isn't really like that. it's like an understanding of anti-depressants as Bad Thought Deleters, just kind of super literally invested in the an outsider's understanding of the concept. twitter is great & super interesting in a million ways, i think, but i think the idea that it's essentially insubstantial is wrong, provably wrong, misunderstands what it means to write out thoughts, something which even if they were subject to character limits one wouldn't be restricted by twitter in expressing (you can link, you can split things into multiple tweets, you can abbreviate, you can grandiosely essay-tweet, &c&c&c). expressive sentences aren't always long & the sort of space a tweet takes up in expression is really beautiful, i think, like it's a proposition, it's phil elverum saying he can 'make you think that'. & i feel like a bunch of stuff that's at least occasionally attached to twitter, ie evidence of its credibility - increased visibility of conversations about social justice, individual international reportage, humour platform less openly unhospitable to women, &c - also rejects the idea that it's vapid, is somehow a truncated form of like ... whatever the thought that ran 179 characters would have been. you know. constraints are good. newspaper writing isn't bad because they needed to make it fit five hundred words. & it's super satisfying to play with arbitrary constraints. i remember going to the dentist & imagining a kind of Foam Dome style hat that would be mounted with two of the weird suction tools the hygienist was using to vacuum my drool, something i could wear around town to be able to drool freely, & being just so satisfied that i could actually compress this hellish vision into something tweet-size, shareable. it got zero favs? so, you know, OBVIOUSLY the system is not perfect. the soundbite panic patron sailor mentions is sort of super interesting & salient too, like i can remember feeling really persuaded by reading that the length of an average interview extract on the news had dramatically reduced, to sort of bumper-sticker proportions, since the '70s or whatever, & that as a result the discourse was impoverished, that our understanding was diminished because nuance was excised. but twitter feels oppositional to that too, just because its breadth can be so wide, & because the practice of using it - seeing someone say something, & then clicking into that, reading whatever else they've wrote, writing them or whatever - is like ... conducive to conversation. short attention span is probably just a fundamental byproduct of info overload stuff, now, like the ship has sailed. twitter is cool though.

i'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but the point was that twitter forces this concept, unlike, for example, this message board, which has no character limit

c'mon, buddy

formal constraints don't dictate content

next

hmm I think they influence it, though

weird twitterers r funny

of course, but twitter doesn't "force" any sort of content

true!

people who do this extended numbered rant thing, I am not sure that is the best use, but the format doesn't preclude it

i mean there are skilled communicators writing of all kinds of great & diverse stuff on twitter 24/7, if you choose to disregard that in favor of a blinkered judgement against the form, well that's on you imho

yeah I mean have you even followed me yet? if not you're missing gems:

https://twitter.com/djperry1973/status/600846435328884736

the form is extremely good which is why so many interesting ppl use it, its the only power user social network

the numbered "tweetstorm" thing is kind of annoying to me, but yeah

you can also tweet links to longer pieces of writing that can't be condensed! imagine that

also people regularly post screenshots of text to get around the character limit

the screenshots of text thing is dumb imo

shld be noted too that systemic police brutality against ppl of color staying in the news is has a lot to do with twitter, ive watched repeatedly as the media attempts to ignore another police murder and protests are organized on twitter and the message is amplified until the media just is forced to pay attention, obvs its not the exclusive reason #blacklivematter is trending but im convinced its key

it also gives people a very linkable, stand-alone platform for scrutiny, for better or worse. some tweets can be taken out of context, but it's also a single place where people have commented over time. so instead of one asshole racist comment on a newspaper story, you get a stream where you can see this person is consistently grinding an axe

I thought the president already had a Twitter.

See, that's a plus: you can have as many Twitters as you want!

it would be nice if most of it were well-intentioned, but it amplifies people's worst side

― F♯ A♯ (∞), Friday, 22 May 2015 18:26 (2 hours ago) Permalink

Have you read this place? ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)

LOL Schlump I agree with your post and love that it was made in a way that couldn't be posted on Twitter - how many characters are on your post up there? :-)

Thinking of twitter as an ilx that isn't as time-consuming, plus of course can be used by everyone. Also like the how tags on #issue mean you can read thoughts on it from across the political lines.

Totally unsurprised man of the old ilx have migrated to Twitter. The constraint means you can just about junk the thoughts in a way that you don't feel is necessarily diluted. Twitter has a ton of energy to it, precisely due to its compression of thought. Plus convos are going to not take as much time.

Means that, unlike ilx, you can get other things done.

yeah, totally energetic. or just conducive to that kind of super broad remit. i tweet a lot about nespresso, i feel like i am doing important work in shining a light on its dynamics in the public sphere. twitter is part of a healthy diet, i think. like it works in concert with posting & writing & e-mailing elsewhere. it isn't a logan's run moratorium on all elements of your life never exceeding 140-character utterances ever again, it's this hub through which a lot of other things are routed (it is an interesting, dynamically-different alternative to instagram for posting pics, for example, i think).

re: healthy diet. Yeah I found other outlets for Twitter. Just love quoting poetry or a line I'm reading, or talking about the TV I'm watching (Columbo needs it) plus find a ton of stuff to read - which I now tend to link on here.

yeah absolutely
actual-quoted-poetry & more specifically just the use of twitter for carrying interesting language fragments is totally key, like a real pleasure of it

I think wanting to produce speech is a natural part of human existence and twitter gives a space to that instead of forcing yourself to find someone in particular (or even a message board or specific thread!) to produce that speech to

Dud

i just avoid it because i've already reached my "douchebag on the internet i don't actually know at all" quotient

i meant "person" not "douchebag", stupid phone

whoa. yeah, of course, i need to clarify due to the brevity of my post. something i wouldn't be able to do on twitter.

but basically this:

I've gone through phases where I've followed irl friends, ilxors, professional colleagues, weirdos, brands, activists, and I kinda hate the resultant paste.

― cause baby, now we got dad bod (how's life), Friday, May 22, 2015 7:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i used twitter a lot a couple of years ago. i know how to tailor it, i know the parody accounts, i know the numbered tweets for longer thoughts, i know the twitpic texts/images, i know the abbreviations, i know the essay-tweets, the many ways people use it, etc.. however, most of the actual words are so nebulous it can refer to anything, given that you cannot put it in context a lot of times, making it hard to have any worthwhile conversation on there. it's usually, "hey, what's your facebook/email" through a direct message--taking the conversation OUT of twitter.

did you guys read that post that said twitter is like a bar? yeah, i agree with that: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2015/05/12/twitter_is_a_crowded_bar/

schlump, the many facets you speak to do not add enough substance and creates a world where everything is a passing trend. GUYS WHITE COP KILLED BLACK MAN. LOOK AT THIS PERV LOOKING UP THIS GIRLS SKIRT. @BarackObama MONKEY. Where millions of useless tweets ensue. it all dwindles down to jokey one-liners or pithy comments, which, strangely, can only be replied to with "yeah Richard I don't know what to tell you it just isn't really like that". everything becomes prone to misinterpretation on twitter because of the character limits. the only people that have fun with it are those "in the know". that's to say, people who share a dialect that is abbreviated yet understood by only those in a clique or small circle. like you say, it takes an understanding of that language or situation outside of twitter. i have to know what is going on outside to understand twitter, but then what is the purpose of twitter?

the best use of twitter, for me, is as a piece of art, such as this account: https://twitter.com/permudat

but most don't use twitter optimally given its constraints. and notice i never said "no constraints". twitter enforces a character-limit, which i don't like. but that doesn't mean i like no constraints. it's like saying i don't like formal verse poetry and thinking this means i like blank verse that has no constraints. that's just silly, since even blank verse has its own self-inflicted constraints.