The title of this post comes from a conversation I had with my dad, about why exactly he should care about ‘tweeting’. (It's interesting how my parents tend to throw "the" in front of words- my boyfriends mom still calls it "The Bell")
It took me a long time to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. It took me relatively less time to jump on Facebook way back when, but I was bribed with the ability to find friends and travel mates pictures from our group trip to China. I’ve always been iffy about what I publicize about myself, and I found it weird that people would base judgments of me on 140 character statements. Also, I didn’t overly understand why exactly I (or you) would care about what I bought for groceries, that I’m getting take out, that I’m mildly bored, or, as one of my recent tweets stated as I awkwardly sat with a roomful of librarians at an AGM watching me awkwardly from my glass surrounded office right beside the board room where in a roomful of librarians, every one of them over 60 has an ipad, and everyone under 40 has paper. The rest have laptops.
The longer I’m on it (and I’m past a 1000 tweets, for better or worse) the more pleasantly surprised I am by it. I’ve found some interesting professional and personal relationships and as a way to get up to date information it’s invaluable. I’ve found colleagues around the world with similar interests, am able to follow news of my undergraduate degree and I even have a Direct Message (ok, so secret) book club where we chat about all of our guilty pleasure books. I’ve connected colleagues in relating but separate fields of film and music, to web designers and grant writers, had off the wall late night study decompression tangents, and even created a Toronto trivia team like no other. Twitter, blogging and other social media outlets can be a great way to both connect and stay connected but are also an amazing tool for staying relevant.
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