Moving away from my usual art posts on this blog, I have some opinions I would like to write about and this blog seemed like a nice place to do so.
I have been in school for about a month now, and as it is my first year of college, I have entered the new atmosphere that is college level classes, and overall am quite content with what I am taking. I am part of the Parks School of Communications here at Ithaca College, and as such, I am required to participate in a class for all of the freshman in Parks, once a week for half of the semester. Now, I wont talk about my opinion on this class, but instead about their promotion of Twitter in this class. Every week, students are expected to "tweet" in and are also encouraged to tweet in questions for the speakers, and I have very mixed feelings about this. As someone who previously did not have a Twitter, the whole concept was very foreign to me. If you look at my Twitter account, I have one tweet a week, addressed at the class' designated hashtag in order to be marked present. But as I have become more acclimated to using Twitter, I am struck by the different ways people use it. While I think the idea of using social media in a class all about innovation and forward thinking is very clever, I am struck when looking through the tag at how my fellow freshman peers use their Twitters.
Today in class we had an issue where our leader for the seminar took a break to talk about the importance of being professional and understanding your "digital footprint" as many employers look over Facebook pages and Twitter feeds when considering job applicants. Now, I have always been of this mindset and try to be very aware about how I appear based on my Facebook page. But as I look at some of the Tweets that appear on my dashboard, not only from my peers in Park, but from others, I notice a different mindset that is prevalent in the Twitter community. It is easy to be disrespectful or post distasteful content on Twitter, prefaced by the general mindset of Twitter, where it is acceptable to complain about anything as well as be sarcastic and make snide comments. So as I was scrolling through Twitter in class today, I began to wonder what made it acceptable to behave this way on Twitter? Why do the many users of Twitter not think about the consequences when they post on the Park feed that they think one of the Skyped-in lecturers is cute for all to see? And then I considered who the most popular users of Twitter are--celebrities and other public figures.
It has become such a social norm to see Tweets by celebrities in which they voice (sometimes ignorant) complaints, vulgar thoughts, with the most popular of their tweets being passive aggressive slurs against other celebrities. Now there are those who maintain professional Twitters but also throw in some jokes and humor, and those are the 140 character notes that I enjoy reading the most. But the creation of unnecessary drama without real consequences is where I think the majority of Twitter's popularity comes from. For the most part, unless the Tweet is extremely controversial, we don't see any celebrities being reprimanded for minor offensive comments. Usually if a celebrity posts a shallow or borderline offensive tweet, we see it re-tweeted and responded to by other Twitter users, but it never really leaves the world of Twitter. That is, unless it is exceedingly offensive, controversial, or politically oriented but Tweets of that nature are not what I am discussing here. I am talking about the typical shallow comments, where ignorantly complaining about the smallest of things, criticizing others, and making shallow (and usually poorly received) jokes are openly accepted and mimicked by their followers.
There is a mentality instigated by this in which it is believed that nothing inside of Twitter can be real or have consequences, and I think this is further encouraged by using celebrity Twitter accounts as models. The movie stars and musicians who post minor offensive or inappropriate Tweets do usually have jobs that they can lose over it--they have their image and assumed personality and the influence of their name to protect them from being turned away in an interview based on the content in their Twitter feeds. But unfortunately this is not the case for the "nobody's" who are in my generation. With the extreme competitive nature of today, one cannot afford to have a whole collection of ignorant and half formed thoughts creating an implied persona of them that does not adhere to their true identity or the person they would like to project to the world, and I find that to be the true danger of how I see people using their Twitters.
