Twitter: The place has a double-edged sword

I signed up a Twitter account @LInsulate in 2012 and the reason I signed up was to follow some NBA stars like Kobe and Lebron to focus on their activities. While because the existence of the block we call “wall”, I have to use VPN to view Twitter, which always makes me too lazy to use my Twitter. Even if now I am in an environment where I can log in Twitter without VPN, to be honest, I still don’t have a habit using Twitter like the way I use Weibo(Chinese Twitter).

While to be honest, two-week Twitter assignment makes me find some interest points. In past two weeks, I followed 12 people who relate to the sports, no matter he or she is a player, a journalist, or an analyst. A funny thing I found is that more than half of these people don’t use hashtag frequently, some of them, like @stephenasmith never use any hashtag(at least after I followed him) except share video with an auto hashtag created by the app he uses. This phenomenon in my own perspective is caused because as a professional, especially in sports field, need one always remains neutral. “While Where hashtags indicate group-level discourse…often brings them to the attention of the trending topic algorithm ”(Brock, 2012, p. 541). What’s more, the identity of opinion leader in their field may make this happens easier. So in my point of view, these people prefer not to use hashtag regularly to avoid potential quarrels.

 

A totally different image was shown when I focus the list I created, because all Twitter accounts I added in this list are brand accounts, they always use hashtag to emphasize the latest goods they release or the topics for propaganda. As Crandall and Cunningham opinion, hashtag makes “people do the work of finding the information and having discussions…This strategy could be good for democracy as/if it stirs people to discover and converse” (Crandall & Cunningham, 2012, p. 27). I agree with their viewpoints while in my opinion a good hashtag which can be remembered by people easily, like #heretocreate by Adidas, is helpful for them to build an image of goods or brand.

Talk a little bit more about “list”, Weibo has a similar function like list that you can classify people who you follow into different groups, while Twitter makes it more convenient because you don’t need to follow the person you want to add. I think it is really useful for people, maybe especially for some celebrities, who don’t want others to know who they follow while wanting to focus on some certain people. What’s more, based on my experience in past two weeks, using a list absolutely saves our time. To be specific, when you add people in a list, you avoid wasting time during scroll and scroll to find the tweet you would like to see, and we always add people in the same field in the same list, so we can easily find all these people’s attitude in a very short time when some significant things happen in that field.