A Reflection on Twitter

For me, using Twitter is a challenge, because it makes me write in a more terse fashion than I’m accustomed to. This is a useful exercise for me, however, because it forces me to polish and condense what I need to say into it’s most basic elements. It really is a matter of doing more with less, and this is by design, making Twitter a unique digital writing environment unlike any other social media site. Linking me with all of the students in my class who utilize the hashtag enc4416, Twitter is seamless at displaying content that is relevant to me and allowing me to search for my classmates using this hashtag. What’s interesting about Twitter is that with one linking hashtag an entire group of people- people with different majors at UCF, various career goals, and divergent lifestyles- can all become connected and included in an online community, and contribute to a global discussion about digital environments already happening on Twitter. In addition, Twitter creates a more personal experience than I would otherwise have in an online class by showing me the faces and thoughts of my classmates and professor. I can learn about them and their perspectives in regards to the class content, and learn more about who they are by their personal Twitter activity. Also, Twitter is a wellspring of resources related to our studies, examples of concepts we learned about, and interesting conversations regarding digital writing. As a continuous stream of resources and a portal to global conversations, Twitter as a digital writing environment is valuable because it organizes itself using hashtags (#enc4416 has all of the relevant tweets regarding this class and it’s concepts). #enc4416 becomes a connecting element, and the creation of a new social group is formed around a common area of interest. Future classes studying digital environments can look back on this group using our hashtag and benefit from the resources we have shared, and can continue to add to this ongoing conversation. In this way, Twitter has been a useful tool, resource sharing medium, and community facilitator for this class and for my own growth as a writer in digital environments.