Writing Project #2: The Context Analysis

Analyzing Twitter.

I joined Twitter in 2009 out of curiosity and word of mouth, I didn’t fully understood the technology at first, for a while I thought it was a place to watch content from companies and individuals, but I wasn’t sure about the type of interaction it entailed. "What am I going to do, tell the internet what I ate for breakfast?" I asked myself at that point. 11 years later, I'm checking Twitter every morning when I wake up and maybe 8 or 10 more times during the day. Twitter has become the place where I get my news, where I check in on my friends and people I admire, where I go to make jokes and read good essays. My first source of personal and public information.

Twitter is perhaps the easiest of all the main social media platforms available today. It has access through computers and any mobile device with internet connection. It is free, all you need is an email account to access it. It has a lot of corporation content, but there is not much paid for or intrusive advertising. It has no features for visually-impaired users which leaves a huge sector of the population outside its scope of influence and It has no translation tools, which limits the information you receive to the language you speak and understand.

Twitter is fast, in a click it spreads information quickly and in a few seconds people can react to it. It is open and almost everyone in the world has access to it, unless you have no access to internet or you live in a place where the tool is not permitted like many dictatorships around the globe. It allows interaction with leaders and celebrities that otherwise are accessible, you can shout a reclaim to your elected official, or praise the work of your favorite actor, and sometimes they can reply back. Since it is so easy to access, it is perhaps the most relevant tool for the dissemination of political ideas and agendas, which fuels a lot of its controversy and missuses. Twitter has shaped the way people express their ideas, is no longer what you think or express, It is how many people you can spread It to. You can be an anonymous person in your real life but if you write the right tweet, thousands of people around the globe can see what you said.

Twitter is entertaining, you can get access to jokes, gossip, interesting thoughts, cultural relevant information, memes, witty remarks and opinions. It is informative as many authorities, institutions and media companies use it platforms to share their messages and relevant information. It makes room for discussion because it allows you to share your opinion and reply a tweet publicly which often leads to unnecessary discussions and arguments. It allows you to share your point of views, there is virtually little censor of what you can share on Twitter.

On the downside, Twitter is prone to fights and arguments that has little sense, sometimes people just argue for the sake of it. Sometimes they are there just to give you a bad remark. Some people are just there to troll and make mockery of the content. It has a lot of fake information, so many times, people can get confused, disoriented, and anxious and concerned for not real reason. It has also lead people to vote without having actual facts in their mind. There are not many filters for good spelling and writing, so the proper use of language is irrelevant. People can use symbols and write badly with no sense of grammatical structure and punctuation

And yes, some people use it to harm or miss inform.