Alysse Eberhard, Marissa Miller, Rachel Shaw, Cover Story Editors
September 27, 2011
Filed under Cover Story, Top Stories
“Facebook is dead.”
So says junior Sophie Borione, who turned to Twitter as a comparable method of communication after her parents took away her texting privileges. However, she went on to say, “Twitter [exposes] people’s personal lives too much.”
Twitter is a popular social media network created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. He sent the first tweet under the username @jack. Twitter users mau use up to 140 characters to express thoughts. Included among those 140 characters may be hashtags (#), which denote the most important or entertaining parts of the tweet, and the commercial at symbol (@), used to alert Twitter users that a post concerns a particular person.
Celebrities use Twitter for outreach. News stations use it to provide succinct news updates. Everyday users post what they are eating or what they plan to do next, or they have conversations with friends via tweet.
As of June 2011, Twitter users sent approximately 200 million tweets a day.
“Facebook is a classic social network, and at the end of the day I’d rather have that than a Twitter, but Twitter is just so funny. Since people are constantly tweeting and making things interesting, I’d say I’m on Twitter more than I’m on Facebook,” sophomore Jen Neary stated.
Neary originally created a Twitter account because it offered immediacy. “I loved the idea of saying what was on my mind whenever I wanted to, without it being annoying like it would be on Facebook,” she said. She tweets anywhere between three and 30 times per day, broadcasting her life to each of her 136 followers. She stated that her posts are about “things that make me laugh, or I quote someone that I’m with [who is] saying or doing something dumb. Also, I talk about #jennearyproblems.”
AFTER THE JAPANESE earthquake and tsunami, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, the voice of the Aflac duck, tweeted, “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll [sic] be another one floating by any minute now.’” Gottfried apologized after the post backfired, but Aflac, an insurance company, fired him nevertheless.
Executives have been fired and athletes have lost major sponsorships as a result of thoughtless tweets, and the fact is that the average person simply does not think very much before tweeting whatever is on his or her mind. Such filtering negates the immediacy of the Twitter experience.
“I don’t really think before I tweet,” Neary stated. “I just tweet what pops into my head because I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
Twitter users who post their uncensored internal monologues should consider the broad reach and permanence of their tweets. Twitter offers only rudimentary privacy settings; either only your followers can see your account, or everyone (regardless of whether they have Twitter accounts) can see it by Googling your name. Even if a user chooses to make her account private, Twitter exchanges between her and Twitter users whose accounts are public can be accessed in part.
In April 2010, the Library of Congress tweeted, “Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — all public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.” It is still unclear as to what qualifies as a public tweet; however, it is clear that tweets can be used, for example, as evidence of cyber-bullying.
Junior Cori Smith stated, “I don’t tweet about my personal business, so I rarely feel the need to hesitate when I want to tweet.” She is in the minority.
CNN Senior Middle East editor Octavia Nasr was fired after she tweeted about her respect for an anti-American terrorist, using a Twitter account affiliated with CNN. She later apologized, but the tweet is archived in the Library of Congress, meaning that it can later be found and used to judger her character.
Teenagers as a group are especially prone to ignoring future consequences of their tweets. Students looking for jobs or applying to college will be considered based on their online profiles, but fail to take that into consideration now.
In a Facebook interview, sophomore Colleen O’Donnell stated, “I don’t really think about what I tweet; I just kind of tweet it. I go back and delete tweets that I think are dumb, but at the time, I don’t really care. If it’s interesting, I’ll tweet it.”
A version of this article appeared in print on 26 September 2011, on pages 8 and 9 of The Shakerite.
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