Twittervision
Oh social networking, how you’ve transformed our world. Or not really. More accurately, how you’ve given us more crap we have to check on the internet every 5 minutes. Yes Twitter is fun but I still don’t see the point. What makes even less sense is the vast array of apps that have shown up for it. It is a glorified status update! I’m not a technophobe (most Geographers seem to be) but I am waiting for the day when everyone of this generation just says “Stop!” and we all stick with one thing. Will that ever happen? Probably not; nobody is listening to tapes anymore (who listens to CDs?).
With all that said, Twittervision is pretty sweet (although it is a colossal waste of time since I am not just watching where people are tweeting instead of studying for my German final tomorrow.) The geographer in me loves adding Twitter geodata to a map, but what I really find interesting is seeing where people are tweeting from, namely first world nations or nations that are pretty well off. I have yet to see a tweet from Africa, mostly just North America, Brazil, Europe, Japan, and Australia with a few outliers here and there (India). This just further enforces my feelings that these new toys are nothing more than that. Sorry you are starving and being oppressed, I am too busy fitting my thoughts into less than 140 characters.
Looking at people communicating around the world (and seeing people do it on a map gives you a great way to visualize the global connectivity of the internet) it may seem that we are breaking down communications barriers, but are we really? I’m not talking to these people and they aren’t talking to me. Mostly they are tweeting to their friends who probably live close to them. Do you really care that there is some dude in Perth who is bored tonight? What are you gonna do, tweet him back to go hang out? I don’t think so.
Also the fact that this post will be broadcast on my Twitter is not lost on me.
