My surprise Twitter anniversary

Image via Pxhere

Twitter informed me this week that it is my 'Twitter Anniversary', that it is 13 years since I set up my original account on the platform. Over that time, I have posted more than 5,000 tweets. Ask me now, and I have no idea what most of them are about; maybe bad offside decisions in football, bad takes on movies by me, bad puns. 

Earlier this year, I set up a second account.   

As part of the 'E-Learning Theories and Practices' module on the MA in Technical Communications and E-Learning at the University of Limerick, students have an assignment that requires us to create and maintain a Twitter account, posting material relating to e-learning and technical writing-related discussions. 

Sounds simple, right? And it is simple, in many ways. Posting a tweet — a short message — on the social media platform just requires users to input any information they like, press enter, and it is immediately live. But the tweets we post for this module need to on e-learning and technical writing-related discussions. The tweets should be informative and thought out — maybe a little more nuanced than what I posted on my previous account. 

Posting using the #tcidul hashtag links all of the tweets related to this discussion and posted by students, lecturers, and graduates of the MATCEL course at UL.

I have spent 13 years on Twitter but have found this assignment has made me think about the platform in a different way.

In my opinion, the hashtag here is key. It links the information posted to our community of users. I’ve been on Twitter for 13 years but I can’t say I’ve really felt part of a ‘community’ on the platform before. The #tcidul community brings me in touch with classmates, lecturers, and graduates.  

The assignment has offered me a fresh reminder of how Twitter can be used as a collaborative aid in education and in the workplace. The use of the hashtag #tcidul to group tweets has opened a window into areas of technical communication I haven’t thought about before, guided by the ‘community’.

Of course, Twitter is much more than just our #tcidul community, and allows us to interact or follow a whole world of users beyond this. For new users from my class, it has opened up an undiscovered treasure chest of information. The hard bit for them will be to decipher what is useful from what is not, and what is true from what is not. That’s something that isn’t always easy on Twitter.  There are many 'bad actors'. Not everybody is who they say they are.

Twitter is difficult to regulate, the information unchecked, often deliberately misleading, even from official accounts of real people and organisations. During the Trump administration in the United States, it became an instant feed, often unfiltered by press aides, into the mind (and sometimes the viewing habits) of the holder of the highest office in the United States, President Donald Trump. But that didn’t always mean what was being published by Donald Trump was true. Eventually, Twitter censored President Trump’s feed but hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts publish information that is uncensored, unverified, and often untrue. Twitter users need to be aware of this.

When Twitter was created back in 2006, it was designed to simply share "status updates” the company said, “for staying in touch and keeping up with friends no matter where you are or what you’re doing".

Four years later, Twitter was selling itself as something far more: "Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world." Since 2014, Twitter has simplified its tagline to: “What's happening.”

Perhaps the best way to describe what Twitter can be for us, on the MA in Technical Communication and E-Learning course at UL, is a tagline the company used in marketing in 2011: "Discover what’s new in your world."  We just need to keep in mind that new isn’t always right.