on becoming a twit (or a flap)

i was recently reading Lankshear and Knobel’s piece on Facebook as an environment for multiliteracies (more on that over here).

There is some disagreement around these social networking sites, that you must be self-centred to use them, or that they will damage your brain (eg this article). 

For me it’s about staying connected with colleagues and friends all over the world; staying in the loop.

i use different environments for different purposes: so on facebook i’m a social creature, while on twitter i aim to appear as a professional educator. It’s taken me a year to come to grips with twitter, while i felt at home in facebook within a couple of weeks.

Anyway, twitter is so 5 minutes ago .. i found this hilarious video via the inimitable michael coghlan in SA: “the world of nano-blogging”. Look for the special “Flutter-eyes” glasses, with the in-eye news scrolls. Could we mix these with a direct upload from our pov glasses too?

i was thinking that new vocabularies arise around new technologies and their accompanying social practices. Think of the podcast, coming from the iPod; and then the vodcast, being a video podcast.

Now of course we have a bunch of new words from twitter, including tweet, re-tweet .. tweetival, tweetfest, tweethearts .. (and so on)

If Tony Karrer says we are all infovores now (with an insatiable thirst for information) ..then i think i have met some Twittervores!

Plenty of places online where these new vocabularies are stored: eg the urban dictionary, and yes a “Twictionary”. Language just keeps expanding doesn’t it!

(PS to be honest i thought twitter was just awful until Greg Bird pointed me toward TweetDeck .. where you can be selective about following just a small group of people, set up ongoing keyword searches .. )

PS: Here’s a very funny cartoon lampooning the whole thing. Look out for the Fail Whale as it feasts on all the Twitter-lebrities!! Found this on a page full of cartoons.

(PPS: links: 

• find me here on twitter
• twitalzer says that i have close to zero influence, clout and velocity as a twitterer. But i have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and apparently bundles of generosity. So that’s ok with me. 

1.  photo credit: onasut
2.  photo credit: JoshSemans

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