Twitter Postmortem
Best Tweets:
I consider these to be some of my best tweets because though there are simple examples of identity tourism, there are others that people don’t necessarily think of all the time, so finding a less obvious example showed my level of understanding for the topic.
These are also in my top tweets because of similar reasons as the first; though there are simple examples of curating content in social media, I also thought of less obvious examples, which I believe show my understanding of the topic.
I believe these belong in my top tweets because they show that digital technology and humans don’t just have to merge as cyborgs for digital technology to help people change their understanding of their bodies.
Worst Tweets:
This tweet was extremely simple and though food can be used to learn about culture, there was little meaningful explanation for it in this tweet.
Similar to the first tweet I showed, this one does show a little understanding of the subject, but I don’t believe my explanation was descriptive enough, and I also think that the example I came up with was extremely simplistic, which shows that my understanding of the subject probably wasn’t as good as it could have been.
I believe that this tweet was made for an in-class assignment, but I remember struggling to find information about the person this tweet was about, and I know that I didn’t do any outside research on him. Later in the class I did start to look up authors and people discussed in class, but this early on I didn’t know to do that, so this tweet can be used to show some of my growth in this class.
Though I thought the challenge for this tweet was very interesting, and I am interested in convergence culture, I think this tweet shows little understanding of the assignment since I couldn’t come up with other examples of convergence culture.
As you have already seen, I didn’t have enough tweets to fully complete the curation section of this assignment, which I think was one of my biggest weaknesses in doing this Twitter journal. At the beginning of the class, my tweets showed less of an understanding of digital culture and were of lower quality in general, which is why the tweets in my worst section are for the most part from earlier twitter challenges. As I learned more in this class, though, I believe the quality of my tweets got better, as did my understanding of digital culture. Many of the challenges at the start of the semester were also less challenging than ones near the end of the semester, which in a way made me produce lower quality work because of the combination of not knowing enough about digital culture and me oversimplifying the assignment.
Overall, I did enjoy the Twitter challenges, and it definitely did challenge me to think deeper about the topics discussed in class. With a few slight adjustments I think the Twitter journal can be made into something that students will actually participate in and actually enjoy doing.
I think the best way to engage more on twitter (especially for someone that solely uses it for this class) is to dedicate time in class for them. Through class discussion I got a better understanding of the topics for the challenges, but by the time I got around to actually tweeting about them, I’d forgotten some of the discussions from class. Doing them in class also ensures that they actually get done, and I know I struggled with because I never use Twitter. Personally, I didn’t really engage with my peers much in class, because I had to go through the class hashtag to fund their tweets and see their opinions. I think the best way to create classmate cooperation on Twitter would also be to have it done in class, because the assignments where we had to work together in class and tweet together were the ones where I actually worked with other people in class. Other than that though, the challenges were effective in helping me get a better understanding of digital culture.
