Let me start by saying I do not want a Twitter. I have no need to make one and I'll give some reasons why.
First: I understand that many people have a Twitter just so they can follow their favorite celebrities. However, there are ordinary people who like to tweet just for the fun of it. But there will always be one person who loves to tweet every detail of their day. These people exist even on Facebook, but there you can always hide their posts. I don't know if that is a setting on Twitter since you probably wouldn't follow those people anyway. But if it's one of your friends, you feel kinda obligated to follow them. That is just one of my social networking pet peeves: those people who find it necessary to tell the world every detail that's going on.
Second: I don't have a favorite celebrity that I need to know their life story. I don't have a need to follow sports teams since I can get all the information from espn.com. And to be totally honest, I don't need another social networking site to procrastinate more of my time on as it is.
Third: As Professor Levinson points out, the average age of Twitter users is 37. That is probably because many of those users do not want to create a Facebook. But that means that many of my friends aren't actually Twitter users. So unless I want to follow celebrities, sports teams, or just so I can say I have a Twitter, I don't see the need for creating one.
Professor Levinson talks about a Congressman who didn't update his privacy settings on his Twitter page. It seems that many people today never actually take the time to read directions or small updates that have been made. That is why when something electronically new (that I have never used before) comes out into this world, I always try to read, or at least skim the basic directions. But I try to read the advanced directions because you never know what else something can do. For example, Gmail has filters that can automatically label, skip the inbox, or even star your messages. Sometimes, it's actually worth those extra minutes to read the features of something new, especially something that can go public.
Twitter and Facebook are not either/or, and it is pretty common now to have your Twitter feed into the status updates on Facebook and other social media sites, thereby allowing you to maintain an active status without having to sign in everywhere.
ReplyDelete