Yesterday, while looking through old drafts of posts, I found one on live-tweeting. It seems to speak to a question that I posed at the end of one of my recent posts:
I wonder, does the point of twitter exercises for class and/or tweets in general, always have to be about “attracting other people’s attention”? What other goals do twitter users have besides attracting attention and sharing information?
Here’s the draft with some extra reflections from my most recent live-tweeting experience.
Fall Reflections on Live-tweeting
I’ve become increasingly interested in the value of live-tweeting for enabling me to engage (and document that engagement) with ideas and readings. While a lot of attention is given to twitter as a tool for sharing links and information, not enough attention is given to other potential purposes for twitter, like using live-tweeting to document the thinking/discussing/exploring/engaging process. Over the past few years, I have spent some time experimenting with and writing about my own live-tweeting.
While live-tweeting enables you to share/make public the process, the primary goal is not to share, but to document and archive a process and make that process accessible to others. For me, it’s great if people read my live-tweet notes; I can get feedback from them or maybe provide them with new information. However, I don’t live-tweet just for the purpose of sharing; I live-tweet because the brief character limit + the public nature + the easy interface encourages me to quickly/immediately post my reactions to/thoughts about key concepts and ideas. Plus, with all of the tools for archiving now, I can put all of those tweets together and create a timeline: a document of how I engaged with an essay/how I think. Live-tweets reflect how I think–something that is very important to me, documenting how I engage and communicating that with others. They enable me to make visible/expose my process.
Here are some ways that I’ve live-tweeted (using storify or screen shots, which is very tedious).
Yesterday’s Live-Tweet with @kjcfalcon
Yesterday afternoon, I did my first tweet-chat/live-tweet with my It’s Diablogical writing partner, KCF. She archived our tweets over at storify: Diablog(ical) Live-tweet with @Undisciplined (me) and @kjcfalcon. It was the first extended, explicitly dia(b)logical twitter conversation that I’ve done. My past live-tweets were almost all about taking notes for a class presentation or about a book, film, article. Occasionally those live-tweetings would involve interactions with other twitter users, but usually it was just me, in the moment, documenting my engagements. Here’s how I tweeted this fact:
At first, I thought it was difficult to keep track of everything that was being tweeted. I also found it difficult to respond to all of KCF’s great questions. And, I’m not sure, in the moment of tweeting and tweet-talking, that we were able to achieve many deep moments of engagement (I think we had a few). However, I don’t think the deep and meaningful engagement needs to always come in the moment of the tweeting. Part of the live-tweeting process for me is to archive the tweets. Here’s what I tweeted about how and why this is useful:
I really appreciate revisiting past live-tweet archives. I’ve used past/archived tweets for remembering an experience of an engagement, finding key passages for blog/article projects, re-connecting with a text or idea that I had forgotten about, and for further reflection on ideas that “came to me” through the process of live-tweeting. Here’s one tweet exchange that KCF had during our live-tweet that I want to reflect on further (and which I think I’m already doing in this blog–at least a little bit):
I want to spend some time (soon, not now on a Saturday morning) developing a quick statement on how and why I use twitter.
