This is the 47th #WILTW
A week of annual leave and moving house (still no broadband!) has significantly reduced the amount of time I spend on Twitter.
Maslow's Hierarchy of social media engagement: http://t.co/lKfbfWqodD pic.twitter.com/iRqvIQtcMM
— Hootsuite 🦉 (@hootsuite) February 20, 2015
While the hierarchy of needs diagram is fun the last fortnight has enabled an honest look at my relationship with Twitter. I am keen to point out in lectures it is a form of social media, not the social media. I find the use of different social mediums is very specific to the individual. What one person hates about one, is why another person really enjoys it.
Social Media consists of different beasts, each having their own potential strengths and weaknesses.
I’m focusing on Twitter as it is the medium I chiefly use and taking a step back has highlighted the following:
- I am guilty of sometimes being more concerned about my absence of involvement in twitter conversations rather than the twitter conversations themselves.
- I suffer from ‘I need to say that first’ syndrome.
- Its real time nature sometimes makes me uncomfortable about responding or interacting for fear of being noticed of being online.
Some difficult truths which say more about me rather than Twitter itself. But what to do about these ‘complaints’? There is an additional paradigm which came to light in some revealing feedback I received which is Twitter users tend to support Twitter users. There is a potential overall inflation of quality, especially of lectures, if twitter is the only vehicle for comment. This partly stems from Twitter being an immersive, generally positive, but intermittently hostile, environment which doesn’t always reflect the real world. It is a bit of escapism, but in which you receive validation not present in other environments. My ‘complaints’ a reflection of my ego acknowledging its own faults perhaps and projecting them onto twitter? An uncomfortable conclusion so while I find Twitter immensely powerful the break has been useful. Commentaries on the adverse affects of social media are not new but as I experiment with #WILTW I am taking a gamble that this acknowledgement will be helpful perhaps not to me but others as well.
What did you learn this week? #WILTW