TWITTERBUG

It's official! I have now finally set-up a Twitter account. I have to admit that I have been avoiding Twitter, not out of malice, but rather due to the fact that I thought I would have to post evanescent musings about life in general to a virtual audience hungry for even the most mundane scraps of trivial information. I can understand the concept of correspondence and writing to someone in the traditional sense by putting pen to paper, but the idea of "Tweeting" seemed somewhat soulless, or artificial. Well, now that I am part of the "Twittersphere", and have to participate, I have come to realise it can be a powerful tool which can be used to communicate important information such as news updates instantaneously.

The process of creating an account was fairly straightforward: first create a username then a password. That wasn't too hard! And I even managed to use my name and not some pseudonym. Anyway, I will probably change it later in order to sound mysterious. Once this was done I simply added a few details to my profile page such as language, timezone, country etc. Originally I did select the "Protect my Tweets" box as I preferred to maintain a certain amount of privacy, which in this Web 2.0 age seems almost impossible. However, as I soon discovered when I wanted to tweet to the Doc Man 1 group discussion at: #isys1166, my tweets were not visible, or were not being published. After deselecting this option, my tweets then started to appear. I have also discovered that other users can also become your "followers" without approval if the "protect my tweets" option is deselected. I have had to block several users already! I am a little concerned about the issue of Twitter and privacy, as I will discuss further in more detail.

My views of Twitter are of a fairly amateur standing: I have not quite become fully versed in the useability of Twitter, and still remain somewhat hesitant to tweet. I think this is partly due to the nature of learning a new technological tool, and also due to the way that twitter represents how technology is shaping social and cultural trends: social networking sites are becoming increasingly widespread and can possibly be controlled by corporate entities and government bodies, where forms of propaganda, advertising and celebrity worship have become the norm. These are just a few of the concerns that I have already noticed on Twitter, and they are difficult to avoid. As a user, I have already started to follow a variety of different tweeters, and have found that every now and again I will receive a random tweet from a company advertising some sort of product. This brings me to the issue of user privacy and protection: who can access private user information? Who can view user tweets? And who saves and records user tweets? After a little research, I found an interesting article on tracking user locations: http://socialitemedia.com.au/twitter-over-sharing-and-potential-privacy-issues-point-and-case/983/. This article dealt with who can view user tweets, and alarmingly, who can track user movements by linking Twitter with other social media accounts. I also discovered that the Library of Congress digitally archives all tweets since 2006, which comes under their historical preservation program. This is an interesting issue as it involves a section of the government being able to access user information in the form of tweets: http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/. What are the legal ramifications of this?  Can tweets be used as evidence in a court of law? All interesting questions that I'm sure will set new legal precedents when these sorts of issues arise. 



** My Twitter page ** 
image taken from: https://twitter.com/

                

And a final note on Twitter: I will give Twitter a chance and I shall continue to tweet on a semi-regular basis as I'm no doubt sure that as a prospective librarian, I will need to be an expert on all things Twitter - who knows, I may even become a "Twitterbug".