• by elizabeth , July 14, 2009

Thank you so much for all your comments on my last post about Twitter. Clearly, I was missing a huge piece of what Twitter is. Although I understand now that Twitter has functions other than just updating status, I personally still don’t see any reason for me to adopt Twitter into my basic media routine. I am not (along with many other college students) the first person anyone should come to with questions or advice about technology. My exposure to technology and media is basic: I have a TV with a DVD player but no Tivo and a computer, which I use for Facebook, email, television shows that I watch online occasionally and I follow Ball State athletics.

I don’t keep up with the latest and the greatest gadget or application when it comes to technology, and, in the college world, I’m not alone. Before I wrote my last post, I talked to a few friends who do Twitter, and answering the question “What am I doing?” was primarily what they did (with the exceptional tweets to ESPN and the like). Those were the few friends who do Twitter; most of us stick to Facebook.

As college students, at least in my circle of friends, our lives are about school, sports, and socializing – mostly socializing. I can see all the wonderful possibilities Twitter has that you’ve mentioned, but in a student’s life at this point in time, social networking seems to be Twitter’s main function. We already have Facebook for that. For my life, Twitter isn’t something that I have time to do, and a lot of college students feel the same way. To a typical college student (not the early adopters, like David), adopting media solely because it’s the next and newest isn’t enough – it needs to benefit our lives in some new way and for now Facebook is sufficient for me.