Drowning out the noise
A critical reflection of Twitter as a microblogging site
Microblogging is the process of posting small pieces of content frequently onto online sites. Many sources would add to this definition- writing for Lifewire, Nations deems it to be a ‘combination of traditional blogging and instant messaging’ while blogger Clifford Chi focus on its purpose of quick audience interactions. Most commonly, we know microblogging from sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
As someone who has been using social media for many years, Twitter has always daunted me the most. Perhaps it’s the endless information, very outspoken users, or the fact that it seems to be increasingly dominated by political agendas and figureheads. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started realising how useful and interesting Twitter could be.
Having only used it in the past to interact with my friends, I started using Twitter to research current topics within the journalism industry. I quickly became hooked on following threads, seeing how celebrities responded to certain conversations and reading headlines as soon as they were released. Twitter is a wonderful source because it offers so many types of media, with longer blog-style posts interspersed with photos, videos, infographics and hyperlinks. It is visually and mentally stimulating.
However, it is also somewhat a sensory overload. Some of the threads I viewed were so overcrowded that you could scroll for ten minutes and not reach the end, often with spam, irrelevant or indecipherable posts taking up a lot of the space. Another issue I found is that where Twitter was being used to discuss a controversial topic, one point of view would often drown out all of the others, making it hard to get an unbiased view of the conflict.
For example, I’ve spoken before about following the Assange case; on Twitter it is very hard to find any objective information about Assange since the threads are completely dominated by his supporters and hashtags such as #freedomforassange and #freespeech. I wanted to find out why he was at risk of being extradited, but this information was lost within the mass of social activists. At times there was so much activity on this discussion that I would be reading a post at the top of the page and the whole thing would refresh with entirely new content, with the former top post vanished completely.
When looking at criticism Twitter has received, many comments linked Twitter’s ‘noisy’ interface with its lack of a strong algorithmic system like that employed by Facebook and search engines, meaning that the content users see tends to be more generalized rather than specific to them. However, I’ve always despised the idea of algorithms and that we are limited to the information that computers deem to be suitable for us. There’s almost something refreshing about being bombarded with so many opposing views, new perspectives, and users of all different cultures, ages, nationalities and beliefs.
However, I do think users need some help in ‘drowning out the noise’, as I agree with Spivack in his article for Venture Beat that “The signal-to-noise problem in Twitter has a negative impact on engagement and reward to consumers.” He puts forward some interesting ways that this could be improved, such as to ‘implement congesting pricing’. The idea behind this is that users could pay to have their tweets gain more exposure, putting a greater value on tweets deemed to be important. However, I don’t think users’ ability to get their voices heard should be limited by their income. I believe a better method would be the suggested ‘points system’, which would give a high rating to users that have high levels of interaction on their tweets, engage with other users’ content and regularly share and click ads to increase income for the platform.
In terms of my own Twitter usage, I think I need to do more nit-picking to narrow down the accounts I follow and find ones that offer valuable, useful information rather than just frequently posts. I also want to make sure the content I view is a balance between my peers’ accounts, those of public figures and those focussing on certain causes or topics, so that I can use Twitter as both an educational resource and a social media platform.
If you’re on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you and hear your stance on some of the current conversations in journalism. My Twitter handle is @LRTJournalism if you would like to read more.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Thanks for reading.
www.blog.hubspot.com/marketing/micro-blogging
www.lifewire.com/what-is-microblogging-3486200
www.venturebeat.com/2016/01/30/how-twitter-could-be-10x-bigger/
