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4.3 Communicating Through Social Media

To get a general idea of how these collaborative sites operate and how they and other social
networking sites can affect your privacy, let’s look at three examples: Twitter, Facebook, and
LinkedIn.

Twitter

Twitter is an alternative to posting long entries on a blog and allows you to post short state-
ments about what you are doing or thinking at any given time of the day. You have a maximum
of 280 characters for each post, which is called a tweet. Visit http://www.twitter.com to
explore the social media platform.

Given how short they are, who would
care about these tiny tweets? You may
be surprised. In early 2012 Twitter was
generating excitement over who would
become its 500 millionth user. Twitter
can be used to share interesting places
you found on the web, ideas you have,
a life event (someone tweeted at the
altar as he was about to kiss his bride),
a frustration, or a question. Registered
users can read and post tweets, but
unregistered users can only read them.
Steven Bernard/age fotostock/SuperStock
But Twitter is for more than just shar- As a registered Twitter user, you can send
ing personal details. Twitter can help 280-character tweets to Ashford University class-
you connect specifically to people who mates, celebrities, or any of the social media site’s
most interest you. You can follow other millions of users.
people’s posts, create and participate
in polls, and track celebrity posts.
(Singer Katy Perry was among the first to have 100 million followers on Twitter.) You might
use Twitter as a way to get to know your Ashford University classmates better outside of
class. Through the Ashford Café, many students establish relationships and use Twitter to
keep in contact throughout their college programs.

Twitter also has a practical benefit for businesses to promote their products, for theologians
to discuss faith, and for scientists to announce their latest discoveries. Twitter has been used
to organize gatherings, sometimes called flash mobs or tweetups. If you wish, you can have
conversations about specific subjects using “hashtags.” A hashtag is a word or phrase pre-
ceded by a pound sign (#) and is used to identify, describe, and organize messages on a cer-
tain topic. You can add hashtags to your own tweets or click on hashtags in others’ tweets
to see all the tweets on that topic. For example, if you wanted to make a comment about the
Super Bowl, you might include #SuperBowl in your tweet. If you wanted to see what other
people were saying about the Super Bowl, you might click on #SuperBowl in someone else’s
tweet (or in Twitter’s list of trending topics) or search for #SuperBowl using the search bar.
Some have used Twitter to encourage political engagement and social activism: Hashtags
such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #MAGA (Make America Great Again) have been used
to facilitate discussion, diatribes, and debate.

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