According to The New York Times, Michelle Slatalla wanted to keep in touch with her kids via Twitter. But the kids resisted. They said it was spam, pointless and creepy in a surveillance kind of way.
Walter J. Carl, an assistant professor of communications studies at Northeastern University notes:
“The people who I see using it are an older demographic, people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”
In other words they, or us, as the case may be, are using Twitter as a self-promotion tool, not a conversational tool.
There is a lot of linking to one’s blog post of the hour and that does seem misplaced to me. Followers on Twitter most likely already read the blog in question, so they don’t ned to be driven there.
