Late to the party

After putting up extensive resistance, I finally folded recently and set up a Twitter account. Somewhere between the competing reminders from Google Buzz and Facebook, I reached the conclusion that I needed a bridging tool and that Twitter was the obvious choice. Of course there were consequences to this choice. The most immediate of these was that the mysterious language of tweets (all of those @s, #s, and RTs) immediately became clear to me. Don't get me wrong, I understood what they were for in theory before setting up an account. This didn't change the fact that prior to entering the Twitterverse when they popped up in my Buzz or Facebook feeds, their actual meaning was always slightly obscure. Now of course, I've become a contributor to the morass of Facebook posts that include these curious characters.

The second major consequence of joining Twitter was that I was immediately propelled into the act of vicarious conference attendance. Partially this was just due to timing. Meaningful Play 2010 and Internet Research 11.0 both took place more or less right after I set up my account. Given the large number of digital media researchers Twitter scraped from my Google address book (the same people I wanted to follow anyway), after setting up my account I was promptly swamped with tweets about pre-conference activity. This was a pretty bizarre experience for a couple of reasons. For one, the people whose tweets I was following were often engaged in a dialogue with people who I wasn't following. This was further complicated by the fact that Twitter conversations are back/side-channels. They fill in parts of the negative space of conference discourses, but for the rest if you're not there all you can do is lean on your knowledge of the conference, attendees, and topics under discussion.

The third effect of joining Twitter was that I suddenly realized that having a data plan on my phone might be nice. There have obviously been other instances when I've thought that my choice to not have a data plan (so as to not check my email compulsively) might have been an error. Most often these have been moments when having Yelp or Google Maps would've been really beneficial, or those times when I've been travelling all day knowing that somewhere on a Google server the email was in fact just piling up. With Twitter though it's a bit different. It wasn't that I felt an immediate need to tweet while mobile, nor was I driven by a compulsive need to know what was happening in Twitterverse while I wasn't watching. Rather, in relation to the conference attendance thing, I realized that the phone makes sense for tweeting in ways that the laptop just doesn't. This is especially true for me due to the fact that I'm a really loud typist, but it's also clearly a function of Twitter as a medium.

At any rate, I'm definitely late to the party with Twitter and now I have to figure out what the heck it is that I'm actually using it for. Is it for conferences? Another avenue for finding media related to my professional practices? Another avenue for finding awesomely amusing media that's a total waste of my time? A way to let people know what I'm having for lunch? That'd be Yes, Yes, Yes, and decidedly No. If I start tweeting about where I'm going to eat and what I plan on ordering, one of the five of you who read this blog will have to call the funny farm and have the nice people in the white coats come and get me.