Twitter is the new micro blogging utility that enables its users to post quick notes about anything. These posts are known as tweets. The existence of Twitter is largely due to people wanting to quickly update their friends and family without having to sit down and do it the conventional way which is via blogging. This gives Twitter the technological edge of being able to reach almost anyone within seconds (Walsh 2006). Twitter is now linked with the other new form of media publishing known as Facebook.
Some may say that Twitter is just another form of sensationalized SMS but the truth behind the success of Twitter is because of its capability to reach anyone and everyone who is on Twitter or Facebook. Similar to blogging, it is possible for the audience to 'follow' the tweets of a particular individual. The most followed individual on Twitter is actor Ashton Kutcher with approximately 4.8 million followers (Twitterholic 2010). Twitter has revolutionized the method of keeping in touch with one another that even their greeting question above the status box has been changed from 'What are you doing?' to 'What's happening?' (Financial Times 2010). The question at hand is whether or not it is possible to be too connected to each other and where should we draw the line?
References
Nutall, C. 2009, What’s happening? A lot, says Twitter COO, last accessed 16 April 2010.
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/11/whats-happening-a-lot-says-twitter-coo/
Twitterholic.com, last accessed 16 April 2010,
http://twitterholic.com/
Walsh, M. 2006, “‘Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, p.24-37.
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