Writing 101 – Day 17 – Mine from your own material

In February of this year, I tweeted, “I want to be able to look back at my tweets one day and see how much I’ve grown as a person since I started tweeting. #SensibleTweeting“ on my personal Twitter account.

I didn’t really tweet much after that because I wanted to cut back on my addiction to social media and engage in something productive. When I went through my old tweets for the sake of this assignment, I realized I had made the right choice.

There is so much unnecessary data floating around in the black hole known as the Internet that it seems pointless to add more rubbish to it. My earlier tweets have been nothing more than unimportant fleeting thoughts passing through my mind at that moment and it seems that Twitter was my only way of expressing them. It was fun yet sometimes cringe-worthy to look back at them (I have fangirled embarrassingly too many times to count) but most importantly, it was interesting to see how much I have evolved since the past 4 years that I have been on Twitter.

Now when I look at my old tweets, it seems to me that I was merely talking to myself aloud. I’ve had very few actual conversations on Twitter and most others have only been retweets.

Maybe I’ve changed. I am definitely not the same person who would get excited at a Twitter or Facebook notification. I’ve also been a bit wary of social media and sharing personal bits and pieces about my life which is why most of my accounts are anonymous. Personally, I feel that having a real platform to talk about things you care for is much more important than sharing a few words in 140 characters which gets lost easily in the flotsam jetsam of the Twitterverse. But that’s just my opinion and I don’t want to contradict anyone else who thinks otherwise.

However, I had a ball of a time reading my old tweets. I didn’t realize that I had sent out some really witty ones in jest and it was fun to use the creative content generator Poetweet to create some random and hilarious poetry out of my tweets.

In conclusion, Twitter (and Facebook) are great at spreading the word around and creating a huge brand presence but my personal preference of a meaningful platform as a form of expression and audience engagement has definitely been blogging on WordPress. Having said that, if you enjoyed this blog post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help spread it by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. One can’t be too antisocial! 😉

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