Twitter and What I Found There

Altman, Gerd. "Twitter many f panels system" April 2015 via Pixabay. Public Domain.

Twitter is a great source for spreading information.  I explored various twitter feeds surrounding Computer Science, my major, and made some generalizations about what I found.

1. What kinds of things do people on Twitter seem to be talking about, debating, arguing about or otherwise engaging in meaningful exchanges of ideas about?

These computer science Twitter feeds tend to talk about new developments and news in the field, famous quotes, fun images, and information tidbits.  Generally there doesn't seem to be much arguing or debating, but when there is, it is usually about small technicalities in products or ways to improve the field.  Although I haven't seen it, there may also be the occasional tweet trying to correct misunderstandings in the general populace.  For the most part, these Twitter feeds just seem to be spreading information around, and include many links to external stories.

2. In your opinion, what are the two most interesting conversations or stories you found in the Twitter feeds? 

One interesting story I found on the Computer Science twitter feed @comp_science was a link to an article "Why Humans Prefer Print Books" discussing several disadvantages to reading eBooks instead of print books, and explaining why that once promising market has started to decline.  I found this article to be especially interesting to me because it dealt with reading, a hobby I enjoy, and put to words the feelings that I have toward reading print books over eBooks.

I found another interesting story as a link to the article "The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment" from the twitter feed @ryan.  Ryan Block is an editor, technology critic, and startup founder.  This story was about the imminent Bitcoin collapse from the perspective of one of the project's developers.  It was interesting to see how the experiment of virtual currency worked and what decisions led to its predicted downfall.

3. Overall, what impression do you get of your discipline based on what you saw happening on Twitter? Were the people in these feeds talking in ways you expected or did not expect, about things you anticipated they'd be talking about or things you had no idea they'd be discussing? 

I don't have a Twitter account, so I was unsure what to expect from these Twitter feeds.  I think I expected them to be more professional in nature.  While there were plenty of more professional tweets, there were also a lot of fun posts and jokes characteristic of Twitter's more social media nature.  I also didn't anticipate how broad a scope of topics these feeds would cover.  They included many tweets where the computer science aspect was secondary or even only in the background of the topics.