Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) : Howard Rheingold : City... - 2 views
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It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
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use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.
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successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
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Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
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The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.
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Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
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I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
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A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
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Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
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A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
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Community-forming - Twitter is not a Community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
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Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
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If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
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Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
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My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
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"Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It's not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We're beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings, recently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it. "
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Using twitter effectively is a critical thinking skill. Howard describes this in detail.