This year, I want to make sure that I can be part of the conversation at Twitter. It has become much more than a passing trend in recent years and is the platform of choice for many younger generations who finally–for better or worse– got their own voice on the internet. With all its ups and downs it still gives people so much freedom to express themselves, discover new things around them, and perhaps give something back as well with meaningful conversations. Let’s see how far I get
During Bloganuary, bloggers who blog about their private lives write about a topic-oriented writing prompt every day in January. Today’s prompt is: What is something you want to achieve this year? I am tackling that this way.
For 2023 I want to try to keep a hand in Twitter, given a lot of the attention, it’s got among social media platforms (and I’d say it is my favorite social media platform) about how it will do this year. It is the kind of platform that appeals to people from my generation, who never had a voice of their own until Twitter arrived and they became “very online,” which sparked the Twitterverse, a kind of “cult-like” zeal for microblogging that resulted in a lot of weird communications.
As far as I’m concerned, it wasn’t restricted to my generation, it doesn’t seem too weird to me, and Twitter gets a lot of hate (ironic considering it is often accused of being a platform for spreading hate speech, which is terrible, to begin with). Those with extremist views are usually targeted because they are unlikely to appear in the “real world,” the world beyond Twitter if they were not on Twitter.
On Twitter, I rarely see hate speech, and I would be offended if I did. There is a lot of negativity on Twitter, I agree, which does pose challenges to people’s mental health (and overall stability, I suppose), but a lot of that is in the form of sarcastic humor not all that different than the poor taste of ghastly writing that marked a lot of the best of the golden age of television, which also appeals, I suspect, to lots of people of my generation, but not at all entirely, and which isn’t the voice of the individual that Twitter lends itself to letting people feel they have (and which is obtainable). This one corner of the Internet offers the opportunity for the formerly unrepresented to move from silence to membership in a group of like-minded people, and while it has changed greatly since it first became a topic in mainstream media, no one has yet been able to totally negate it.
I’ll never feel I wasted time doing it because it was a lot of fun. It’s no longer as cool as when it resembled its original design, but products change, and with the bottom line that’s said to be facing Twitter, if it does have a chance of surviving say until the end of the year 2023, it will probably be accompanied by an upswing in popularity, which some say is happening, and which I sincerely believe is happening far more than those who believe it doesn’t.
I’ve seen it declared dead before. Despite my displeasure, I’m confident it’ll be more eventful than usual, given the excitement about it. It reminds me, as I mentioned above, of those days when it was discussed in the mainstream media.
Good luck if it’s your favorite one, too. Could well be a few highlights left to enjoy.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 