Fun with Twitter!!!

When I started my career at Red River College way back in September of 2013 I knew very little about Twitter and the social media. About seventeen months later I’ve learned a little. This education was accelerated last week when I was given a Twitter assignment for my News Radio class.

For the class we are required to listen to talk radio for fifteen minutes every day during the week and then tweet about it.

With the hash tag #NewsRadio we are supposed to tweet five times a week. This will be a significant increase over my regular Twitter activity. (in the past I’ve gone months without using it)

For some reason I’ve never fully embraced Twitter. I’m not really sure why that is.

In general I am not a big personal fan of Social Media, although I can see the professional benefits.

 I only joined Facebook because I was in Korea and didn’t know anybody. After I found out there was a group for people in Guri I decided to sign up. I ended up meeting so many people because of it.

When I first heard about Facebook I thought it was totally lame. I resisted joining and only signed up because I felt I had to. I had been in Korea for less than a month and didn’t know anyone in my area.

This might sound strange, but I could go weeks without seeing another white face in public. There weren’t very many people for me to talk to.

The social media known as Facebook put an end to all of this.

Basically I had a need and Facebook was able to fulfill it. (find friends who spoke my language)

So far, due to my own professional blindness, I have not been able to discover the same thing about Twitter.

This changed last week. Suddenly, Twitter has a purpose. Going on twitter and posting  five times a week will help me get a good grade in my class.

But there is more.

I had an interesting first week embracing Twitter.

For my first tweet I wrote about what I heard on the Charles Adler radio program on CJOB. Taking the instructor’s advice, I made sure to include the Twitter handles of the people I was writing about, and this would allow them to read it.

My first tweet got re-tweeted by Charles Adler. I was so proud.

 For my next tweet, I wrote about something I heard on the Nighthawk, another show on CJOB. They were talking about the Harper government and whether or not it was afraid of science.

Of course I made sure to include Harper’s twitter handle. A few minutes later I got re-tweeted. It happened again a few minutes after that.

Some conspiracy nuts/groups decided to share my tweet and mention me in others. I wasn’t sure what to make of this.

I hope this doesn’t mean I’m on some nut job/wacko list myself.

If I am, we all know who to blame.

Cheers,

Rymr.