Catching Up With Twitter

Born in March 2006, Twitter was not as welcomed as it is today. Used and sometimes abused, twitter has quickly connected everyone: real people, fake people, people pretending to be other people, people just pretending, etc. Twitter also provides information sharing as a personally designed “news feed”, quick blips of reactions to tweets, and mini-meetings.

Defined as "a short burst of inconsequential information" or "the sound a bird makes", twitter now can be much more consequential. Can. For about eight years, twitter has grown from finger chatter making noise to spinning off into its own company in April of 2007, growing into mass use (and I’d argue from mass creation from demand), until reaching 2011 and functioning more as the twitter sphere machine we fondly follow.

I first learned of twitter in February 2009 while attending the Illinois Computing Educators conference and recently stumbled upon my old blog here. I wrote in my March 17, 2009 post, “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Much like Dorothy dancing down the trail toward the Emerald city, representing all possibilities realized, I find myself fearfully excited as I pace down my own path of realizing technology idealizations for the classroom. Rather than stepping time to, “lions, and tigers, and bears,” I tune to, “websites, and blog space, and Nings, Oh, My!” Throw in a “twitter” and those dang Flying Monkeys appear in my mind’s eye.

Not much has changed in my epic quest since then, but now there are many more flying monkeys dog-fighting for my attention, swooping in at all hours to tell me what I need to know RIGHT NOW. If I’m not careful, the Wicked Witch of the West, will find me, will catch me, will threaten to destroy me with circuitry overload.

Over the past six years of my twitter use, I have stalked information more than I’ve tweeted. Maybe I’m quietly sneaking by the monkeys in my search for “the best” for education, or something. Maybe I observe well. Maybe I should share more. Maybe I know the WWW can easily be doused with a simple bucket of water, and I marvel at all that flies through the air today.

Maybe tweets are focused flying monkeys or maybe they are some short bursts of consequential, versus inconsequential, information that a user can grab onto to soar and fly about with a monkey or two. What is sure, though, is that the quest continues either way, no matter what is flying around us.