Facebook has always been my primary social media
outlet. I use it to connect with friends and family, both in the tri-state area
and out, as well as it is the most convenient way for me to stay in touch and
up to date with school club events, group project discussions and various brands.
Only recently did I begin to use Twitter but it was, at first, mainly for
intern purposes. Due to my type of work Twitter, to my understanding, is a
social networking site that is mainly used for business and brand updates and
every so often “retweets” tweets or posts that would either involve the company
itself, their partners or newsflashes in that particular companies’ industry;
not so much regular day to day thoughts and communication between “regular
people”. Most of the tweets were written in stellar time due to the fact that
in this day in age, trends quickly change from day to day and it’s part of
one’s job to keep up. I saw Twitter from a business perspective (how it’s
useful in the advertising world) but this assignment allowed me to view it from
my own natural perspective: a young college student trying to find out what’s
going on in the world in real time.
At first, I was iffy about the whole tweeting thing.
As we can see by the amount of writing I’ve done so far, I’ve got a lot to say
when I’ve got something to tell. To say it in 140 characters or less made me
realize I’m not on Facebook anymore…(Dorothy joke). As I began tweeting, I saw
an entropic pattern like one tweet would be a plea to Starbucks for them to
build more Starbucks in Staten Island (as a city college student Starbucks is a
must and Erica does not run on Dunkin) and then other tweets would be song lyrics
that remind me of my past relationships. When looking over my classmates or my
friends’ tweets, theirs were posted in an entropic time as well; one random
thought or comment after another. The only “tweet” I found in common out of all
of us was there was always one about school. Due to the timing of this
assignment, my tweets revolved around me stressing over midterms. Looking over
my tweets, paying attention specifically to the timing of a few, we could say
that these tweets were written in teleological time and each new tweet was a
result of my stress worsening as hours of studying went by or as familiar songs
kept coming up on the radio.
Other than what I follow for work, I chose to follow
popular blogs like Huffington Post, digital newspapers like the Wall Street
Journal, popular celebrity icons like my favorite host Alexa Chung and
entrepreneurial magazines such as Fast Company. For the most part, they all
follow teleological and stellar time. Depending on what the topic is, it is
usually told in stellar time for it always affects someone or a group of
people. If it’s a popular trending topic, like a huge story that everyone’s
interested in knowing every little detail about as well as can be updated and
added to frequently, it is told in teleological time. Example: when the Boston
Bombings happened, Twitter was on fire and it was a topic consistently written
and talked about online. It affected our entire nation who followed the story
from the moment it happened to the bomber’s capture. I wasn’t so much affected
by the daily tweets either than I just felt more connected.
Now that I’ve been able to see Twitter from both
perspectives, I can safely say the type of time that most influences a person
is based on what that specific persons’ thoughts are about as well as the kind
of information they are looking for. Like the “Garden of Forking Paths”, depending
on how you view life, it can be seen in either teleological, stellar or
entropic and sometimes, they intertwine.
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