For my response this week, I am going to discuss Twitter and microblogging. Please read this for some extra information.
At first I was not going to join Twitter because it seemed like I had enough outlets to let people know what I was doing online. However, I decided to go ahead and join because it had been mentioned several times in class and I wanted to see what it was all about.
When I first joined I felt like it would be overkill to have a twitter and to update my facebook status and have an away message and have multiple blogs. But over the past couple days of twittering, I have realized that each of these updates serves a different purpose for me. I have developed a system of updating. On Twitter, I am incredibly literal about what I am doing. On Facebook, I tend to only update if I will away for an extended period or want to comment about something that is going on. I have developed a system of about a dozen messages to put up for an away message that I haven’t ever really explained. I like to think that my AIM buddies have seen them enough times along with my explanations when I leave to know what they mean. I save my round ups and general musings for my blogs.
I had a conversation recently with a friend that was annoyed that some of our mutual friend’s blog content seems to resemble just a status update. The article (mentioned above), with its list of tips for twittering, got me thinking about how we share ourselves online.
A recent post in my friend’s blog dealt with the idea of mediated identity and I think a lot of the talk around microblogging begs the question of how much of yourself you share with people and in what way do you wear a mask with each post that you make. How do we pick and choose?
The concept of mediated identity was first introduced to me when I was studying the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar in high school. Though we weren’t talking about identity mediation in the same way that I ended up learning in communication technology courses in college, I always think back to that poem (linked above) when this idea comes up. My discussions of identity mediation always boiled down to you show different parts of yourself to all the different people in your life. This holds true for your Internet self and all the variations thereof. You show different parts of yourself on myspace than you would on LinkedIn, for example.
So, how does this tie into microblogging? From my own habits in microblogging, I can see how I mediate my identity in each. I describe my daily activities in different ways on each of the different sites. Though I am all of these identities, no one describes me completely. I pick and choose what parts of myself the general public on the Internet gets to see on each.
And I wonder about the sum of the parts. If you add up all of my profiles and updates and chatter, do you end up with
-e
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2 comments:
Erin, You're going to have to show me more on twitter ... I guess I can see it's value; but for me, I just don't have that kind of network at this point in my life ... although, that might change radically again as my boys get older, and as certain activities in daily life change ... it is a kind of conundrum .. micro blogging, that is. Interesting post.
Your system for micro-blogging on twitter vs Facebook status updates is brilliant. That was the reason why I initially just used Facebook's status update as my only outlet, but as you've discovered and explored in your post, each can serve it's own purpose. I think I may un-link my Facebook Status from my Twittering to see if I can start a system of my own. BTW, check out my blog post which is also on Twitter and micro-blogging.
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