I May Have Been Wrong (personal Post 3)

They say it takes a big man to admit when he is wrong. I say when it happens as frequently as it does to me it's not that hard anymore. I wrote a post during the semester talking about the lack of things you could communicate with 140 characters, of what I felt was useful information. It turns out 140 characters is enough to communicate a lot both harmful and good. There is a saying from Uncle Ben in Spider-Man lore "With great power comes great responsibility," and I believe people try and seek out information in both positive and negative ways and they can do so with great efficiency through tweets. This was very apparent with the PSU earthquake and also the riot from just after Joe Pa got fired.

The first incident the earthquake was impressive because it spread like wildfire. Not just through Penn State but through the whole east coast.

This shows just how powerful and how quickly twitter allows people to communicate and "activate" if you will. Back in the day you used to have to try and call people or wait for something to be on the news now people can be their own news and try and get every fact feeling or thought under the sun into public light for better or for worse. The Penn State cell network went down because of the amount of traffic and only half the people on campus felt it and it wasn't even that big here. It truly is impressive the need for people to connected and to try and communicate all the time now.

Unfortunately we were in the national spotlight on the night Joe Paterno got fired. With all of the media here they caught us at our worst and I thought for sure I would find a trend of PSU students trying to organize on twitter unfortunately I was unable to find that. Also more unfortunately I was able to find a link to people tweeting during the riot, both from and not from the campus and it doesn't shed us in a very pretty light. The link is here to the Bleacher Report. The students moved like a well oiled machine I suppose because of previous riots. Which is unfortunate.

Twitter for better or for worse is a place for people to speak first and think later. The word vomit runs ram-pit. People use their brains less and less to try and become part of the hive mind that twitter runs. I am not saying twitter isn't useful I am just saying there are only so many ways to express yourself in 140 characters or less and it relies less on deep thought and more on just being as quick as possible. I hope that twitter proves me wrong and becomes one of the most innovative technologies of the 21st century. Though I am sure most would already consider it so thus far.