Remediating for 280 Characters
Now entering the Twitterverse
This week I reintroduced myself to the wild and wacky world of Twitter. Over recent years, Twitter has solidified itself into Internet history, through various hashtag movements and hashtag boycotts as well as the quantification of trending topics. Although, I have to admit that I find Twitter to be a polarising social media platform, where content often gets misrepresented. Iâve previously opted to take the passenger seat when it comes to publishing on the micro-blogging site and after my week of exploring the Twitterverse, I think thatâs where I belong.Â
Here are some of the tweets Iâve posted.
While exploring and searching my topic of social media influencers, I found that more times than less users were not using hashtags. My search terms included influencer, influencer culture, social authenticity, social media and lastly cancel culture. I first noticed the large presence of news sites and marketing companies using multiple hashtags while most individual users did not. This made it difficult for me to find tweets that offered a more nuanced opinion. For example, when you search #authenticity, scattered throughout the results are some of the most inauthentic tweets also known as advertising spam. I couldnât help but showcase the one below as it contains all the clear signs.Â
I then moved on to retweeting. As I donât consider myself to be a connoisseur of words, I think retweeting is a great tool for users to connect with others work and opinions. I found that users often conveyed their thoughts and feelings via quick-witted humour. While some users did use hashtags or emojis in their posts, they often they were unrelated to my topic of social media influencers.
I also found that engagement levels were lower Twitter than commenting directly to a piece of writing online. This surprised and slightly disappointed me as Twitter has an impressive 330M active daily users. Out of the numerous tweets that Iâve seen this week, general tweet interactions followed this order of popularity; likes followed by retweets and lastly reply comments. This indicates to me that most Twitter users care more about notoriety and hearsay than engaging with other users. Overall, my experience with Twitter this week has been lacklustre. So, I think Iâll leave the platform to the celebrities and politicians while quietly observing from the fence.

















