Twitter is undeniably one of the most popular
social media outlets of this century. This particular media culture allows
people to have a small but expressive 140 character rant, per tweet. Twitter
also gives celebrities the opportunity to casually interact with their fan
bases, and as a twitter user who extensively follows her favorite celebrities,
I cannot deny the immense need and hope for a celebrity to acknowledge your
clever and witty response to their tweet, in which they most likely will never
respond to, (yes it is disappointing and heartbreaking all at once.) I am an
extensive Twitter user. I check it first thing in the morning, last thing
at night, and about a billion times in between. And I post unnecessary things
about what I’m doing, purely out of habit.
Twitter is, fundamentally, a strange, nearly
surreal service. And being a nearly surreal service, it is understood that what
makes Twitter appealing is the way users can manipulate their identity through
it. There are no rules about what you want to say on Twitter, and many users
would have no hesitance in taking advantage of this. In a way, Twitter can be
seen as not only a surreal service, but a virtual reality. Michael Heim described virtual reality as “an event or entity
that is real in effect but not in fact” (Raessens, J, 2005). This completely
ties in with how users operate Twitter, however they desire.
In regards to computer games,
virtuality is described as “the possibility to stimulate virtual worlds a gamer
can explore.” Again, users can utilize Twitter as an escape from everyday life,
or their everyday persona. I have found, in my personal experiences, people I
follow on Twitter are so much more hilarious online, in comparison to their
humor in person. It makes me question, why is this? I have come to the
conclusion that many people are in fact, using Twitter as a form of escapism. Ultimately,
this is what Twitter is about. The ‘Twitter-verse’ fundamentally is an
opportunity for us to post, favorite (like), retweet whatever we choose. The
fact that we can choose how to represent our personality through what is on our
Twitter profiles beautifully depicts a virtual reality.
Reference:
Raessens, J. 2005, ‘Computer games
as participatory media culture’, Handbook
of Computer Game Studies, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, pp. 373-388
