What the Tweet?
A conversation with ourselves about why we use Twitter, what “tweeting” is, and how following and followers create a strange sense of presence and connection we can’t quite explain.
“So let me get this straight…we’re just letting people know what we’re doing when we do this?”
“Right.”
“And we call it ‘Tweeting’?”
“Well, uh, yeah. It’s kinda like a bird letting you know where he’s at, we guess.”
“And we do this how often.”
“Depends. Maybe 4, 5…10 times a day. It doesn’t take that much time, really.”
“Like how much time?”
“Dunno…maybe 10-15 minutes, total.”
“And all we’re doing is letting our friends know what we’re doing, right? At any given moment.”
“Right. But they’re not all friends in the standard sense. I mean we’ve never met some of these people.”
“And they let us know what they’re doing.”
“Right.”
“Even people we don’t know.”
“Right”
“Why?”
“Dunno.”
“Like that guy teachanlearn is ‘Reading RSS’ and he wants us to know that?”
“Um, we guess. But he also wants us to click the link there too.”
“Well, where does that go?”
“Dunno…let’s find out…it’s a blog post about a new WordPress theme.”
“And he felt the need to ‘tweet’ that?”
“Apparently.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We know. It’s kinda hard to explain. We mean we didn’t really get it at first…still not sure if we do.”
“We know all these people…how many?”
“Twenty-eight right now. They’re all in our network.”
“The network.”
“Right. Our teachers…our classroom…remember? We talked about this.”
“Right. And these other people, these ‘followers’. How many?”
“Um, 209 right now.”
“209! And they want to know what we are doing?”
“We guess so, though we can’t imagine why.”
“But we only follow 28.”
“Right.”
“Does that upset them?”
“Who?”
“All those people who are ‘following’ us that we’re not ‘following’.”
“We dunno. We hope not. We can’t follow more than this many right now.”
“But we still don’t get it. Why do we want to follow them at all?”
“It’s just another layer of the connection, we think. We mean on some level, we like knowing that Chris missed his plane or that John’s doing a wiki workshop or whatever. It’s not important stuff on any major level, but it adds something.”
“Like what?”
“We don’t know. Just…just…presence. Just this weird presence thing. And depth. We can’t really explain it.”
“Presence.”
“Well, more than that. We mean a lot of people post links and resources and ask questions and stuff. We learn from it too.”
“And people answer? So it’s like IM, right?”
“Um…no. We don’t do this for conversation, though it turns into that sometimes.”
“We don’t think we get it.”
“We don’t either.”
“Then why do we do it?”
About the author
Weblogg-ed Team — The Weblogg-ed Team is the collective byline behind our editorial coverage. We write about teaching, learning, and the institutions around them as technology and students keep moving faster than the systems built to serve them. Our work covers classroom practice, edtech and AI tools, online learning, homeschooling, digital literacy, and higher education, written for teachers, school leaders, parents, and lifelong learners who want clearer thinking than the press releases provide.
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