First of all, I have no idea if this task is correctly made but hey, at least I have something!
We were asked to write a media observation focusing on our own media consumption habits so I thought I'd write a little about how Twitter has changed my life over the past three years. I'm not going to link my Twitter here though because that would be a bit awkward. You're free to do some detective work though if you're too curious.
Twitter is a social media platform which base idea is very simple: you post short, 140 character messages, "tweets", online. You can also use hashtags and post pictures, videos and gifs. Sounds pretty much like Facebook but the main difference is the character limit and the fact that your account is public to everyone in the world, unless you specifically make your account private when only your followers can see your tweets. You can follow people that interest you and get their tweets to your Twitter timeline.
Twitter's strength is that it's probably the fastest way to get information when something big is happening. For example when terrorist attacks went down in Paris, people tweeted about it first, way before the online newspapers wrote anything about them. Twitter always shows trending hashtags so you know what's popular in different parts of the world. If one wants to be the first to know when things are happening, I strongly recommend using Twitter.
Let's move onto my Twitter habits. I'm part of the Finnish anime and convention scene and Twitter is at the moment one of the biggest platforms for us to share our interests. It's also one of the biggest communities in Finnish Twitter overall! We use Twitter to talk about conventions, what's going on in the scene, ongoing series, recommendations etc.
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| Study about Finnish Twitter usage from 2013. Manga/anime can be seen on upper left. After 2013, our scene has only been growing. Source: http://www.finnishtwitter.com/2013/02/19/presentation-finnish-twitter/ |
My Twitter is pretty filtered though. I like to show the best side of me online, so I leave out political comments, curse words and too personal stuff. I want my Twitter to be a fun (or at least neutral) place for myself and especially my followers, they don't follow me for sad or irritating stuff anyway. One could say that I have an internet persona. Well, it's not a fake one, I don't act like I'm something else than I actually am, I just leave stuff out that I don't feel like belongs there and that should be OK. But is it really? I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Showing other parts of my persona would make people know me better. They would know a more "realistic" version of me. I think this whole "internet persona"-thing is terribly interesting, but I haven't followed my train of thought too far yet. I'd like to analyze this sort of things more, because can we trust what we see online? If everyone only shows their good sides, can we really know them? Is the lifestyle we admire just a fake one? Do we owe our followers that they know "who we really are"? Wow, I think we're going too deep for this time! But, something to think about! ;)
This concludes our topic this time! Now go and create a Twitter account so I can follow you!
Happy thoughts,
Oona
Hey Oona,
VastaaPoistaI am not using Twitter but your post is very interesting and maybe one they I will be there. :)
Michele
I liked your post and I am commenting it since no one elses blog is up for grabs 😂 I found it interesting but personally i dont perefer twitter. I like the way you make me wanna search oyt your twitter account 😂
VastaaPoistaI liked your post and I am commenting it since no one elses blog is up for grabs 😂 I found it interesting but personally i dont perefer twitter. I like the way you make me wanna search oyt your twitter account 😂
VastaaPoistaHi Oona,
VastaaPoistaI like a lot how your post was made. That you chose to write about a media consumption habits change in your life (starting to use Twitter) that led you to become more active within the hobby scene of yours.
Btw. I came to see the dance show, and wow, it was great :D. When I was watching I was thinking that okay, how do these people meet and form up such a dance group, and looks like fun, and hey, matching outfits even - so now I have my answer - Twitter!
I always thought - because I don't know too much about Twitter that argh, there'll be too much sport tweets or political stuff (I guess the info visual confirms that assumption at least partially because the sports and the politics form so big areas on it), but it is great to see the info graphic that shows manga/anime activity being really high! :D
That internet persona thing has been in my thoughts as well... because I need to get back to using social media and internet again.
I hope there's some middle ground - that one is able to be oneself and not only the polished version, but oneself in that bit edited & but still real way. :)
I mean, the depth of any human relationship takes time to evolve in real life, so I guess although social media age has removed some barriers from socialising, it is still allright to socialise and tell about oneself in the level of one's own choosing and what feels right given the circumstances. Sometimes mediabased relationships take time to grow to their full depth as well and like any real human relationship, it takes two, so if it is not only people following someone's media activity one sidedly, you usually get to know other people and meet them face to face too. Maybe not all things belong to media channels, but the people we find with the help of them might be the ones our more personal stuff belongs to if we get along well and so choose. :)
Satu: Why you do not like Twitter? - I need to know :D, haha, because I need to think about which media platforms/channels I'll start to use now that my media hermit time is ending :DD...
Heya!
VastaaPoistaI found your post very interesting, probably because I'm quite a beginner with twitter still and I don't always understand how the replies and stuff work in there. I myself am just a lurker haha.
Would you have any recommendations for channels about cosplaying? Because that's another fairly new interest for me and I'd like to get more into it. Do you just talk with people straight or is there some bigger pages that you follow?
The topic about internet persona is quite interesting too, it actually seems to affect some people negatively when they see their friends having so good time and positive life. It makes people feel inferior when others only show their positive side. I myself find some people "fakes" when they are overly positive about everything in SoMe. But when you just leave out the bad things and go for the neutralness, I think that's completely fine.
Hello!
PoistaDepends on what kind of channels you're interested in! There are many groups in FB about cosplay, biggest being "Suomen cosplay-piiri". It's a place with very varying quality, sometimes you find really useful information but sometimes people just post a lot of unnecessary stuff. For cosplay items there is also "Cosplay-kirpputori" FB group and if you're interested in planning a cosplay performance there is "Suomen cosplayesitysryhmä" too. I recommend reading cosplay blogs too, especially YumiKoyuki's blog (http://yumikoyukicosplay.blogspot.fi/) and Ilona Cosplay (http://ilonacosplay.blogspot.fi/) because they share good tip and tricks from time to time. You can also follow people's cosplay "fan" pages on FB and their Twitters to get to know what's going on in the scene. There is also a newly established Discord channel for the whole anime scene and there is also talk about cosplay so if you're interested in that, maybe lurk there too? ;) discord.gg/w4ZcZhh
I hope this info helps! :'D