In my job I work with
a lot of young people.
By that I don’t mean
I’m one of those cool forty-something social workers who spends most of his
time hanging around young artists and musicians amidst the sweaty haze of
inner-city dance clubs.
No, I just happen to
be about fifteen years older than everyone else in my office.
Sure, I’m the boss (a
pretty cool one in my opinion), but being surrounded by the unbridled optimism
of youth, I can’t help but try to find ways to look and sound younger, to show my
staff I’m still hip to the groove. It’s
a pride thing.
It’s this desire for
eternal youth that led me to the social media phenomenon called Twitter.
At first I was
reluctant. Apart from the hours of wasted
work time many of my staff appear to spend on social media, I just didn’t get
Twitter.
Why would anyone want
to ‘follow’ someone else unless they were a detective or a stalker?
Reading or watching
any ‘news’ item about Paris Hilton was enough to keep me from wanting to know
what the hell Twitter was in the first place!
As far as I was concerned, Twitter was for twits!
But young people can
be convincing and the more I observed my staff not working but ‘tweeting’, the
more curious I became.
So I checked it out
and low and behold, I’m hooked.
What I like about
Twitter is the ability to ‘follow’ by choice individuals or organisations who I
feel might have something interesting or important to say.
No longer do I need to
switch on the TV of a morning to get the latest news and views filtered through
the likes of Mel and Kochie.
A quick scroll through
my Twitter feeds from Reuters, The Guardian or ABC News and I’m up-to-date with
the latest.
Others use Twitter to
find out what certain people are doing rather than what’s happening in the
world. In other words, unlike me, they
don’t use Twitter to get the news.
While I can understand
a serious fan of rock music following say, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters because
Grohl probably has something cool and interesting to say, why would 40,000
people follow Kochie? And why does Paris
Hilton have 7 million followers?
This morning, I
checked Hilton’s latest tweets. I
discovered Paris recently took a trip to New York where she had dinner at a
place called La Esquina. She’s also just
released her 15th fragrance and recently went hiking - truly
fascinating!
The Online Oxford
Dictionary defines ‘twitter’ as talking rapidly and at length in a trivial way. Posting anywhere between 12 and 25 tweets a
day by my count, Paris is clearly an expert.
Other tweets of course are more serious, often fired off as a rapid
succession of news updates on any matter of interest as events are unfolding.
And it's not only professional
journalists delivering the news in this fashion but members of the public as
well, often doing the work of the journalists for them. (Maybe that’s what my staff are busy doing).
So, while Twitter may
be used by twits, it’s not their exclusive domain. Rather, it’s one of many available avenues of
self-expression and information dissemination in our rapidly evolving digital
age.
So, Twitter is for everyone - a tool for thinkers, philosophers and thought-provokers as much as it is for twits and twats.
