Oh Twitter. What a concept. I've had an account for a while, but I'm not sure I ever exemplified the ideal user as envisioned by the site's creators or administrators. I follow mostly friends, not too many accounts for groups or institutions, and I hardly ever follow those I haven't met.
I collected 26 accounts for my "liblist" information-focussed Twitter list. I spent so much time staring at users' quick self-descriptions; without opening the full page for each one, I judged whether or not I would find them relevant or useful. It was fascinating seeing the extent of enthusiastic librarians and archivists defining themselves as such in their profiles, but here was where the shallow nature of Twitter starts to lose me.
Not shallow in an intellectual sense, but shallow in terms of stratification and organization of subject. In a full blog, if the author chooses to post both professional and personal material, it can be sorted with tags or contextualized. With Twitter, I can inspect the account of someone who includes digital libraries in their introductory list of interests and find more about their coffee habit or disjointed, context-less commentary than library-related content or insight.
When I viewed my list, I discovered that Twitter lists don't show retweets. This serves to throw the mix of the stream of tweets even further out of balance; not only do some users tweet at a much higher rate than others, but some make liberal use of the retweet button, creating a discrepancy in the feed I viewed before adding the account to my list and that account's overall presence in my liblist.
Griping aside, collecting this list helped me to gain a sense of the Twitter library-minded presence/community. There are many librarians, archivists, and information/data enthusiasts writing, reading, and sharing tweets about current topics and life's little things. The topics seemed consistent with those touched on in the full blog review assignment, though tweeters can fire off more article links with minimal commentary.
With the required number of accounts to follow set so high, I feel somewhat at a loss to come up with truly coherent conclusions. The range of subject material, rate of original posting, shifting frequencies of posting, and the sheer amount of information available for me to read in just a dozen posts in my list makes the scope of the medium so wide that I almost can't dig in. I like the idea of tweets on their own, but attempting to take in many in a stream does indeed fit the metaphor of attempting to focus on individual birds tweeting in the forest; if I do manage to focus on one at a time, it is at the expense of my attention on the others. Following others is easy, but the cacophony of contribution is not for everyone or everything, and it might even take a trained reader to sort it all out at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment