TECH: The Practicality of Twitter

The Practicality of Twitter

Max Guerrero takes a break from doing the dishes to check his Twitter feed. Once he has seen all of the new tweets, he proceeds to create his own tweet that reads: “So seriously guys, come see my band play with @Havenside on Sunday! 10$ presales, I can deliver :)”

Guerrero, a junior at Davis High, finds Twitter to be both a potent form of entertainment as well as a place for him to promote his up and coming punk band, Adieux. “[Twitter] lets me know which bands are playing shows when and where, and I can also keep people updated on my band,” Guerrero said.

Ezekiel Shadday, who attends Christian Brothers high school in Sacramento and is also a member of Adieux, doesn’t place as high of a value on Twitter as Guerrero does. “I spend about two hours a day on Twitter. Most of the stuff on there isn’t very important, I just like to share my random thoughts,” Shadday said.

Michael Silver, who covers the NFL for Yahoo! News, actually uses Twitter as a tool for his job by tweeting about important sports news and promoting his articles. By tweeting items like “Peyton Manning says he’s past his prime. I struggle to reconcile that statement with what I saw Sunday” Silver is able to convey quick bits of sporting news without writing a whole article.

“I resisted [Twitter] for a while but I eventually caved in and have come to embrace it for the following reasons: It’s a great vehicle for self-promotion; it’s a good way to get reader/viewer feedback; it helps proliferate my brand to the masses, and, perhaps more importantly, to the people I cover; and there are times in this ever-evolving journalistic world where I acquire credible, newsworthy information that is very unlikely to remain exclusive for more than a few minutes,” Silver said.

Twitter, like most of the recently popularized social networking sites, was originally designed with the purpose of sharing, in most cases, insignificant occurrences of daily life and learning of similar happenings in the lives of others.

However, Twitter has somewhat become the primary means of promotion in this day of super obsessive reliance on the World Wide Web. Twitter provides an easily accessible station to publicize information ranging from the latest celebrity gossip, to tips on how to stay safe during hurricane Sandy.

“When there’s no time to write a quick column, or when the news in question isn’t necessarily worthy of an entire column, but nonetheless interesting to some, Twitter is a quick way to get the news out and receive credit,” Silver said.

Twitter’s vast and readily increasing pool of users creates an environment, much similar to the universal assemblage of television viewers, in which an individual can propagate a piece of newsworthy information to millions of people, simply by pressing a few buttons. “[Twitter] is a great instantaneous way to communicate,” said Marty Lurie, a talk show host for KNBR 680, a Bay Area sports radio station.

Although this concept of news spreading traces back to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, Twitter still presents a significant innovation in that anybody with a capable device and internet connection can convey their topic in mere seconds. “The future of it is tremendous,” Lurie said.