Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to answer the questions ‘Where are you?’, and “What are you doing?’ (Murthey, 779). Twitter users can post ‘tweets’ (statements or messages) of up to 140 characters to the rest of their followers. (Murthey, 781) Twitter was created in March, 2006 by Jack Dorsey and a team working at Odeo Studio software (Sagolla, xvii). It was kept very secretive at first by the inventors who limited the site to 50 users (Sagolla, xix). Just shy of one year after its official launch in July 2006, Twitter had already gained 300,000 users (Sagolla, xxiii). By two years, Twitter had channeled more than 1 billion tweets sent (Sagolla, xxvi). Twitter is incredibly successful and free for anyone to sign up (Webb, 7). Twitter is now used by over 300,000,000 people daily (Taylor).

Twitter gained popularity within the mainstream audience in January 2009 (Sagolla, xxvi). After Barack Obama had won his 2008 election, he thanked his supporters via the Twitter service. (Sagolla, xxvi) This intrigued many influential writers, public speakers, and Obama supporters to use the Twitter service (Sagolla, xxvi). Obama now has 12,971,843 followers on Twitter (Twitter). The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India in November 2008 made the public aware of Twitter as citizens were tweeting vital information about the attacks that journalists and news crews could not attend to (Sagolla, xxvii). Furthermore, the January 2009 crash of US Airways flight 1549 was the third event that launched Twitter into the public sphere (Sagolla, xxvii). Janis Krums, a passenger on the midtown ferry, tweeted a picture of the downed US Jet floating in the Hudson. He spread the news faster than any journalist that could have arrived at the scene (Murthey, 782). He continued to tweet while he was aiding passengers from the plane (Murthey, 782). Twitter was also forced into the main stream by celebrities. The two most followed people on Twitter are Lady Gaga with 20,633,070 followers and Justin Bieber with 18,365,461 followers (Twitter).

Twitter’s greatest controversy arrives with the argument “Are we saying more with less? Or are we simply saying less?” (Murthey, 780) The media and the public have been concerned with Twitter’s affect on the public’s reading habits. Is it now more interesting to follow citizen journalists who can tweet about anything over news organizations who regurgitate facts? (Murthey, 784) Some have argued that with modern communication like Twitter, the speaker is distanced from the audience thus the possibility of contradiction is minimized (Bellin, 362). This will enable exaggeration and deceit in one’s Twitter posts creating unreliable sources (Bellin, 362). Yet, others suggest that Twitter is revolutionary in the sense that it is a true account of what tweeters are saying because their ideas are protected by a penname (Jarvis, 59). The debate of whether Twitter is affecting people in a positive or negative way is ongoing.

Twitter is actually extremely educational as it is an engine filled with resources and information (Anderson, 27). Twitter is described as competition to Google as it will soon become the better means to search desired items (Zappavigna, 789). This demonstrates positive affects that Twitter has in regards to the public’s reading. Data was collected from 31,000 students at 114 colleges and universities (Junco and others, 121). It was concluded that the GPA of those students using Twitter during their school year was significantly higher than those that did not (Junco and others, 125). The students that used Twitter utilized it as an educational communication engine as they sent information about assignments and school projects via tweets to one another (Junco and others, 126). This is indicative of Twitter’s positive effects on reading and education in general.

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Bibliography and Works Cited

Anderson, Steven. “The Twitter toolbox for educators.” Teacher Librarian 39.1 (2011): 27+. Academic OneFile. Web. 6 Mar. 2012

Bellin, Jeffrey, Facebook, Twitter, and the Uncertain Future of Present Sense Impressions (March 22, 2011). University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 160, p. 331, 2012; SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 77.

www.twitter.com/BarackObama

www.twitter.com/JustinBieber

www.twitter.com/LadyGaga

Jarvis, Jeff. Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print.

Johnson, J. David. Managing Knowledge Networks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Print.

Junco, R, G. Heiberger; E. Loken. “The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (April 2011), 27 (2), pg. 119-132

Kappas, Arvid, and Nicole C. Krämer. Face-to-face Communication over the Internet: Emotions in a Web of Culture, Language, and Technology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print

Murthey, Dhiraj. “Twitter: Microphone for the Masses?” Media, Culture and Society 5.33 (2011): 779-89. Scholars Portal. Web. 30 Jan. 2012

Sagolla, Dom. 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print.

Taylor, Chris (June 27, 2011). “Social networking ‘utopia’ isn’t coming”. CNN. Retrieved December 14, 2011

Webb, William. Being Mobile: Future Wireless Technologies and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

White, Connie M. Social Media, Crisis Communication, and Emergency Management: Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies. Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2012. Print.

Zappavigna, Michele. “Ambient affiliation: A linguistic perspective on Twitter”. New Media & Society (August 2011), 13 (5), pg. 788-806.