My colleagues still look at me funny when I present something at a meeting and say “I found this on twitter.” When you’re on twitter as I have I have been for some time now, you assume everybody is. But I’m in a small nerdy minority it seems. There are good things and oh boy are there bad things. But you can chose how you use it. You can chose to see the good.
The bad is generic badness of all social media from image crafting to disinformation, to polarisation of views within the echo chamber to keyboard warriors without filters.
And then there’s the inordinate time spent down the rabbit hole – quite possibly some of it not worthwhile… the internet, is indeed endless it seems…
And yet. I have a community of people who I don’t really know and who don’t know me. All around the world. Available day and night. I know they’re not “real” but I know I can ask advice and sometimes get access to world experts in my field
It’s created opportunity – I’ve been driven at some speed around a Formula 1 track because of twitter. I ran around said track too as it happens.
It’s created learning – in so many domains, from clinical tidbits to presentation skills, to alternate points of view, to the most recent journal articles. And if you learn the pitfalls of twitter some of that learning is contemporaneous and fast. The seriousness of the pandemic was apparent to me through twitter considerably quicker than via my establishment…
I’ve seen colleagues get positions of influence because their twitter stablemates knew who they were. I’ve seen people of learning give freely of their knowledge. I’ve seen civility and positivity. I’ve seen #MeToo and #BLM I’ve seen that I am indeed privileged in this world and I’m a better person from the knowledge Twitter has given me.
You’ll note I haven’t really commented upon the bad. Because my experience has been really very positive. Just be careful when you are looking at the entrance to the rabbit hole…