retweet is not a tweet
Since I’ve been lax and lazy, an off-schedule post. I am always happy to take suggestions for academic blog post topics! (leave a comment!)
But anyway, in lieu of a real topic, have some vague ramblings. Two things have converged in my head recently. Firstly, I’ve been playing more in tumblr (gracious hosts of this blog) and I’ve been coming to grips with the ‘new and improved’ twitter.
One of the ‘features’ of new!Twitter is that links and photos are embedded in the stream. Here’s an example from my local newspaper as it appears on my feed:
Now, these types of tweets are incredibly easy to retweet - just hit the retweet button, and poof, the tweet appears, in whole and unedited, in my followers tweetstream.
The difficulty lies in adding a comment to it. Back in the bad old days of twitter, when we had to writer RT @ and then copy and paste the tweet in, you could edit the message or add a pre-RT comment. But with links and images appearing like that, you can no longer copy and paste. And as such, you can no longer add your own comment to the tweet.
My early days in power-using tumblr have a similar flavour. At least when you reblog a tumblr-post, you can add a comment at the bottom. However, beyond liking or going to a specific tumblr’s ask-box (if enabled), I’m finding that commenting on what is going on in my dash is, well, difficult. It may be that I haven’t got my dash set up right. But as it stands, I feel more like a spectator than a participant in what is going on on my tumblr-dash. (It also feels very echo-chamber-y when a post goes viral and everyone reblogs it).
It may be a case that a new way of using and engaging slowly emerges from the crowd, each of us learning from each other. After all, it’s been my experience of social media that it’s very hard to shut folk up! :) But I do chafe every time I retweet in particular, and can’t add a note explaining why I retweeted it. I don’t want to be an echo. I want to be a voice in the conversation.
Hurry up, crowd, I’ve got stuff to say.
