Communication Technology Part 2

 

Today, Twitter is a main source of communication worldwide, allowing for people to post what they please with a large scale audience at their fingertips. However, at the time of its invention in 2007, it was intended for individuals to have an online blog to post life updates. Twitter even started as a podcast venture in 2004. At this time, it was called Odeo, and was only later patented as Twitter when another podcast venture took over. This venture flipped to Twitter and later became one of the biggest media platforms in the world with over 368 million monthly users. Twitter, unlike many other social platforms, was created by multiple men. These men were Biz Stone, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey. In creating this new app, the four men had no idea the type of interaction it would have in the many years following. In 2009, Twitter had its first News posting, paving the way for new users on an extremely large level. This news reporting on the US Flight 1549 Water Landing changed the world of Twitter in a completely unexpected way. Similar to many other communication technologies, the original intent of the invention changed many times over the course of its history. Twitter later took the world on by storm and created an entirely new way of communicating. It allowed for fast communication but also created a new source of connection. Unfortunately, like many other mainstream media platforms, Twitter also began making decisions that negatively impacted its users. In 2017, Twitter made the decision to switch to an algorithmic timeline as opposed to the current system at the time, the chronological timeline. One of the major impacts of this change is that it only allowed people to see certain areas of content and restricted them from others. This then lead to the reoccurring problems of biases, content banning, and restriction that started new sources of activism and anger among its users. This new system also unknowingly added to the idea of "Influencers" which both negatively and positively impacted the world. This concept allowed for individuals to become overnight sensations. In a day, any individual could impact hundreds of thousands of people at the touch of a button. The more likes and "retweets" a person gets, the more the algorithm places their content on the feed of others. Which of course, later switches to the toxic culture of many media services, making individuals feel more insecure than ever. Though clearly the original intent of Twitter was never to be a toxic environment, the shift of the culture and the world later negatively impacted the world. Not to mention, Twitter is a major media service that bans and deletes content that goes against Government policy. Overall, Twitter, like many other services was created for positive outreach worldwide, but later shifted into a collection of impacts that went far beyond anything they could have ever predicted.