Twitter has not only changed the way that we interact with other people in our daily lives but it has also changed the way we receive news and obtain information from news sources or celebrities themselves. Twitter now has surpassed its original uses for simple socialization and has evolved into a platform for marketing and advertising.
Twitter has become the collision point of people of all walks of life, with everything from personal accounts like the one made for the Twitter project to professional accounts like a doctor or journalist. Recently, Twitter has evolved into an omnipotent force that seems to connect corporations and Capitalism directly to us, with the advent of many companies becoming very active on social media to be able to connect with users on Twitter. Twitter has become a great vehicle for information and has become the main place that people find pertinent articles from multiple new sources instead of getting all your news in one place. For example, when HipHopDX, a hip-hop magazine, tweets about a new song or upcoming release, it is complete with a link to their article on that very thing. Another way this takes form is when you are following, who aren’t professionals using twitter, tweet out a link to an article while providing their own thoughts on it. One of my classmates wrote out his points on Mass Incarceration, making great points and then under it all put a link to the prisonpolicy.org website. Twitter has enabled us to be more informed in our discourse, and connect with so many other people.
Twitter is utilized in multiple ways when communicating with the masses, with everything from journalism to political activism. A majority of journalism has somewhat shifted its focus on Twitter. Journalists will now when news breaks make sure to tweet it out first to make sure they were the reporter who broke the news, with the article following right behind. Now, Journalism relies heavily on the clicks they get on their articles so tweeting out the link and having a presence on Twitter has basically become a necessity. This has also led to a sensationalistic approach to the tweets sharing the article for few, to increase the chance of someone clicking on the article. Tying in with journalism is the way that politics utilize Twitter. The majority of political discourse has shifted to Twitter. It’s where most people post their opinions and Twitter played a massive role in Donald Trump’s election, with the future president utilizing Twitter to communicate with his followers. Ultimately, Trump’s use of Twitter won him the election. The paradigm is attempting to shift again, but back to the old way. Use the 2020 Democratic Primary as a key sign. On Twitter, Bernie Sanders holds a clear advantage, despite being one of the oldest candidates running. Much of the battle has been fought on Twitter, with many candidates dropping out after lackluster Twitter campaigns. The reason that the paradigm is trying to shift back is Centrists don’t want young folks on Twitter to decide their politics, simply because they do not understand it. Joe Biden represents the “Centrist Messiah” to stop this. Biden still has utilized Twitter but is mainly only getting support from neoliberal upper-class folks like himself. Although Twitter seems to be the key to getting your politics out to the masses, Centrists and Neoliberals are fighting against that, attempting to maintain the old established way. For example, during the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S.AMany centrists still went out to primaries and voted for Biden while many people had to stay indoors, despite multiple pleas to postpone the primaries. Ultimately what Twitter has done is organize multiple communities onto one platform. With hashtags and keywords that can trend, it is extremely easy to find out what people are saying about a certain thing. Twitter has also organized news outlets, organizations, and corporations onto their site, where we can reach them a lot easier, and see what they are saying.
As mentioned before Twitter has become where people get most of their information and it seems to be the communicator of these events, happenings and general phenomena. The obvious event that Twitter has been communicating to the public and basically has ruled our lives for months, COVID-19 or Novel Coronavirus. It has been very mixed at how Twitter has helped this out. Twitter has been informing us of this for months, seeing how it unraveled in China and other countries. Twitter has been great at providing people with pertinent information about the virus. We have had up-to-date information and we are able to see what the World Health Organization and CDC (Center for Disease Control) are saying every day. The negative of the entire situation is the hysteria that it caused on Twitter and just social media in general. People would see one scary thing about the virus and immediately react to it, without checking the validity of the source. Look at the toilet paper situation in the country. Realistically what must’ve happened is that someone saw a tweet about toilet paper and stores closing, which then led to a reactionary chain and people hoarding toilet paper, so much so that most stores were out for weeks. Another event that Twitter was “the communicator” was the horribly tragic death of Basketball Legend, Kobe Bryant. This is a good example of Twitter having information out there just too quickly. It was reported by TMZ first that Kobe’s helicopter had crashed, with his daughter Gianna with him, killing all passengers. As a result of TMZ posting this, that is basically how everyone found out about Kobe and Gianna’s death, through Twitter. The absolute shock and sadness this caused were felt by everyone. The terribly tragic death of a beloved Basketball legend and his daughter, whom he coached play basketball. It left a dirty taste in many folk’s mouths that Twitter was how his wife found out her husband and daughter had died. The entire situation was horrible, Twitter added gasoline to the flames and caused it to spread like wildfire. At least, a positive that Twitter provided is that everyone had joined together on the website to remember who Kobe Bryant was and to honor him and his daughter Gianna in the correct way. Finally is the way that Twitter communicated the Assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani. With everything Twitter posts, there are always good and bad sides to it. Twitter did a great job of getting us this news on a very timely basis. Twitter helped many Americans voice their true opinions and how Trump’s actions shouldn’t reflect the entire country. The negatives that came from this was that “World War 3” started trending and the memes came with it. Albeit a lot of them were funny, this was many people online poking fun at an extremely serious situation and without the COVID-19 fallout, who knows what could’ve truly come from the assassination.
For my twitter project, I wanted to make my topics something that I know very well while tying in current events. My tweets focused on the Hip-Hop community, specifically the one we have in Buffalo while tying in the current event of the COVID-19 crisis and how that has affected not only my life but our lives. I tried to tweet out what music people were listening to while quarantined while sharing local artists from all different styles of Hip-Hop. For the topics I chose, I am an expert in my own right to those things especially Quarantine since we’ve all been trapped in the house. The accounts I followed were @HipHopDX, which is a website that posts everything hip-hop, @TheGravelInstitute, a leftist organization without neoliberal nuances, and the thing that I normally would’ve never followed that I did was @DaleJr, the NASCAR driver. I have never watched NASCAR so I would have no reason to follow Dale Earnhardt Jr. I followed HipHopDX because it revolves around the same thing my everyday life revolves around. It’s roughly the same with The Gravel Institute, which is an informed leftist organization, so I agree with mostly everything they say.
Twitter has become the new blogging. Using Twitter allows you to be more informal and get your points across in more concise ways. That can also be a disadvantage for Twitter because blogs are able to flesh out their points in much more efficient ways than a drawn tweet thread. Being able to interact with other students became exponentially easier on Twitter though. Twitter is much more user friendly and easier to interact with others. Twitter also serves our shortened attention spans a lot better than a blog would, due to its concise matter. Compared to many other social media, Twitter is the most efficient in providing information. Competitors such as Facebook deal with a lot of “fake news” and Twitter’s verified system has done them lots of justice in that category. Twitter’s form of tweets and ways of getting information organized is wholly elite to other social media platforms. It’s fairly clear that Twitter is the future of how we receive information and how information and news will travel.
Twitter has become the collision point of people of all walks of life, with everything from personal accounts like the one made for the Twitter project to professional accounts like a doctor or journalist. Recently, Twitter has evolved into an omnipotent force that seems to connect corporations and Capitalism directly to us, with the advent of many companies becoming very active on social media to be able to connect with users on Twitter. Twitter has become a great vehicle for information and has become the main place that people find pertinent articles from multiple new sources instead of getting all your news in one place. For example, when HipHopDX, a hip-hop magazine, tweets about a new song or upcoming release, it is complete with a link to their article on that very thing. Another way this takes form is when you are following, who aren’t professionals using twitter, tweet out a link to an article while providing their own thoughts on it. One of my classmates wrote out his points on Mass Incarceration, making great points and then under it all put a link to the prisonpolicy.org website. Twitter has enabled us to be more informed in our discourse, and connect with so many other people.
Twitter is utilized in multiple ways when communicating with the masses, with everything from journalism to political activism. A majority of journalism has somewhat shifted its focus on Twitter. Journalists will now when news breaks make sure to tweet it out first to make sure they were the reporter who broke the news, with the article following right behind. Now, Journalism relies heavily on the clicks they get on their articles so tweeting out the link and having a presence on Twitter has basically become a necessity. This has also led to a sensationalistic approach to the tweets sharing the article for few, to increase the chance of someone clicking on the article. Tying in with journalism is the way that politics utilize Twitter. The majority of political discourse has shifted to Twitter. It’s where most people post their opinions and Twitter played a massive role in Donald Trump’s election, with the future president utilizing Twitter to communicate with his followers. Ultimately, Trump’s use of Twitter won him the election. The paradigm is attempting to shift again, but back to the old way. Use the 2020 Democratic Primary as a key sign. On Twitter, Bernie Sanders holds a clear advantage, despite being one of the oldest candidates running. Much of the battle has been fought on Twitter, with many candidates dropping out after lackluster Twitter campaigns. The reason that the paradigm is trying to shift back is Centrists don’t want young folks on Twitter to decide their politics, simply because they do not understand it. Joe Biden represents the “Centrist Messiah” to stop this. Biden still has utilized Twitter but is mainly only getting support from neoliberal upper-class folks like himself. Although Twitter seems to be the key to getting your politics out to the masses, Centrists and Neoliberals are fighting against that, attempting to maintain the old established way. For example, during the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S.AMany centrists still went out to primaries and voted for Biden while many people had to stay indoors, despite multiple pleas to postpone the primaries. Ultimately what Twitter has done is organize multiple communities onto one platform. With hashtags and keywords that can trend, it is extremely easy to find out what people are saying about a certain thing. Twitter has also organized news outlets, organizations, and corporations onto their site, where we can reach them a lot easier, and see what they are saying.
As mentioned before Twitter has become where people get most of their information and it seems to be the communicator of these events, happenings and general phenomena. The obvious event that Twitter has been communicating to the public and basically has ruled our lives for months, COVID-19 or Novel Coronavirus. It has been very mixed at how Twitter has helped this out. Twitter has been informing us of this for months, seeing how it unraveled in China and other countries. Twitter has been great at providing people with pertinent information about the virus. We have had up-to-date information and we are able to see what the World Health Organization and CDC (Center for Disease Control) are saying every day. The negative of the entire situation is the hysteria that it caused on Twitter and just social media in general. People would see one scary thing about the virus and immediately react to it, without checking the validity of the source. Look at the toilet paper situation in the country. Realistically what must’ve happened is that someone saw a tweet about toilet paper and stores closing, which then led to a reactionary chain and people hoarding toilet paper, so much so that most stores were out for weeks. Another event that Twitter was “the communicator” was the horribly tragic death of Basketball Legend, Kobe Bryant. This is a good example of Twitter having information out there just too quickly. It was reported by TMZ first that Kobe’s helicopter had crashed, with his daughter Gianna with him, killing all passengers. As a result of TMZ posting this, that is basically how everyone found out about Kobe and Gianna’s death, through Twitter. The absolute shock and sadness this caused were felt by everyone. The terribly tragic death of a beloved Basketball legend and his daughter, whom he coached play basketball. It left a dirty taste in many folk’s mouths that Twitter was how his wife found out her husband and daughter had died. The entire situation was horrible, Twitter added gasoline to the flames and caused it to spread like wildfire. At least, a positive that Twitter provided is that everyone had joined together on the website to remember who Kobe Bryant was and to honor him and his daughter Gianna in the correct way. Finally is the way that Twitter communicated the Assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani. With everything Twitter posts, there are always good and bad sides to it. Twitter did a great job of getting us this news on a very timely basis. Twitter helped many Americans voice their true opinions and how Trump’s actions shouldn’t reflect the entire country. The negatives that came from this was that “World War 3” started trending and the memes came with it. Albeit a lot of them were funny, this was many people online poking fun at an extremely serious situation and without the COVID-19 fallout, who knows what could’ve truly come from the assassination.
For my twitter project, I wanted to make my topics something that I know very well while tying in current events. My tweets focused on the Hip-Hop community, specifically the one we have in Buffalo while tying in the current event of the COVID-19 crisis and how that has affected not only my life but our lives. I tried to tweet out what music people were listening to while quarantined while sharing local artists from all different styles of Hip-Hop. For the topics I chose, I am an expert in my own right to those things especially Quarantine since we’ve all been trapped in the house. The accounts I followed were @HipHopDX, which is a website that posts everything hip-hop, @TheGravelInstitute, a leftist organization without neoliberal nuances, and the thing that I normally would’ve never followed that I did was @DaleJr, the NASCAR driver. I have never watched NASCAR so I would have no reason to follow Dale Earnhardt Jr. I followed HipHopDX because it revolves around the same thing my everyday life revolves around. It’s roughly the same with The Gravel Institute, which is an informed leftist organization, so I agree with mostly everything they say.
Twitter has become the new blogging. Using Twitter allows you to be more informal and get your points across in more concise ways. That can also be a disadvantage for Twitter because blogs are able to flesh out their points in much more efficient ways than a drawn tweet thread. Being able to interact with other students became exponentially easier on Twitter though. Twitter is much more user friendly and easier to interact with others. Twitter also serves our shortened attention spans a lot better than a blog would, due to its concise matter. Compared to many other social media, Twitter is the most efficient in providing information. Competitors such as Facebook deal with a lot of “fake news” and Twitter’s verified system has done them lots of justice in that category. Twitter’s form of tweets and ways of getting information organized is wholly elite to other social media platforms. It’s fairly clear that Twitter is the future of how we receive information and how information and news will travel.
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