Thoughts in under 280 characters

My mom made my Twitter account (@ellenakamura)

Yes.  The above statement is true and her reasoning was just for this purpose: for class.  She was convinced that my professors in college will utilize it so she wanted to make sure that “ellenakamura” was mine.  It’s super sweet of her to grab my handle before anyone else could but unfortunately, I never had the chance to use it until now.

Once I reset my password and logged on, I realized that I had followed some users already:  Elon Musk, ScienceVS, WHOI, EarthJustice, SEASemester, League of Legends, and some friends.  I guess I did use it a little, enough to follow 27 users.  Now, I have classmates to follow lol.  But I noticed that I can only send messages to people who also follow me back… hm interesting.

Personally, I’m a fan of Instagram more than Twitter.  I can see the similarities however the biggest differences are the usability of an Instagram feed, more emphasis on the photo than the text, and the community.  What I mean by community is that most of my friends use Instagram but not all my friends use Twitter.  There are some aspects of Twitter that I like though.

I love receiving updates from organization like ScienceVS for upcoming podcasts and people like Elon Musk about cool projects and/or articles about space.  Twitter makes it easy for companies and organizations to communicate to their audience and spread information quickly like a message board, whereas Instagram is a collage of snapshot-pictures.

In an education setting, I can see Twitter as a platform to send quick announcements, sharing news or hold a discussion board.  I think Twitter could be effective for high school classes (if privacy settings are available) to share ideas or thoughts in subjects like art, secondary language, or even history for sharing controversial topics in politics.  I think this would be really fun platform to have debates because you have to get your point across in under 280 characters and/or a gif (to keep it entertaining).  Obviously, instructors have to monitor this type of cyber-debate because it could get out of hand but it can keep the conversation going inside AND outside of class.

Writing all of these positive aspects of Twitter has made me reconsider the possibilities of Twitter.  I might have to look into it more seriously and not just something my mom gave me lol.