Tweet tweet (Or: Now back to our regularly-scheduled deconstruction)

So I joined Twitter, as you may have figured out by now. Judge away, I don't blame you. I can claim I was doing it for "research purposes" but whatever, I have a twitter account. I was bored one day and it provides another time-waster during funemployment. For the most part, it's a depository of links to some of the articles I've written. I don't think my minute-to-minute actions are especially interesting; perhaps that makes me a bad Twitter user. I have a hard enough time coming up with things to write about on here! But at the same time I also feel like I have Joined The Internet. I am now - officially - An Internet Person.

Basically, we can boil down the twitter experience to the following sentence: Twitter has been rather lamentable but simultaneously REALLY INTERESTING, and once you get accustomed to getting your information in that way, it is very difficult to disconnect. I've been on there for about a month now, and the longer you're on it the more it grows on you. It's kind of unfortunate.

What I like about Twitter is that it offers information in an ingenious way. It's kind of like having your own personal newsfeed only about things that you care about, which is really cool. I think 140 characters is limiting - I am very bad at keeping sentences succinct, and don't text messages get 160 characters? - but at the same time it's almost a challenge to see how simply you can state something. Linguistically, Twitter is amazing! (Also, I don't shut up about linguistics.)

It also offers something called Trending Twitter Topics, which are Things Many People Are Talking About. These are fascinating, and it's amazing to see how people create new words in real-time! You can tell what is catching on and what isn't, what makes a good catchphrase and what does not. It also shows what is Really Important on a Global Scale; it's kind of like a Global Newsfeed unto itself. Another thing I do really like about twitter is that it allows you to search users' tweets for specific words, which is occasionally really helpful.

But, I'm also not following a lot of people. I'm following 40 accounts right now, which isn't too bad, but I feel like my Twitter experience would greatly benefit from having friends to have conversations with, but at the same time that seems like a wildly inefficient form of communication. Are you on twitter? You should follow me (@heatherfro).