This week’s reading assignment included two articles about Twitter. “I Tweet, Therefore I Am” by Peggy Orenstein focused primarily on how Twitter has changed the users, while “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” by Steven Johnson highlights how users have changed Twitter to make it their own. Both articles made excellent points, but I relate to the latter article a little better.

Johnson’s article described the evolution of Twitter as a user-enhanced social tool. Rather than balking at the seemingly random and artificial 140-character limit for posts, users accepted it as a challenge and developed what amounts to a new genre of writing, the tweet. Johnson mentions the user-developed hashtag system and @username replies. Another way Twitter users have taken Twitter beyond the expectations of its founders lies in the reasons they use it. For instance, I know several people who use Twitter as a news source. Johnson alludes to this when he categorizes Twitter content as “super-fresh Web.” Depending on who you follow, Twitter can function as a personalized, condensed newspaper.

There is no doubt that such a tool has the power to change those who use it. As Orenstein pointed out, it can be difficult to “sort out the line between person and persona, the public and private self.” Twitter and Facebook have really helped blur the lines, to the point that you can have problems distinguishing between yourself and the show you put on for others. Orenstein also suggested that social media could have encouraged the recent decline in empathy (as recorded by researchers at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan). After seeing the frequency and content of some of my Facebook friends’ posts, I would be inclined to agree. A lot of tweets and status updates seem not only pointless or mundane, but exclusively and inexcusably self-centered.

At the end of the day, though, I think the phenomenon of Twitter is more about what we make it, and less about what it makes us. It can be many things: a distraction, an enabler for superficial relationships, a form of peer pressure, another platform for our contrived selves, and so much more. None of these labels represent an inevitability, but rather possibilities, because Twitter is what we make it—nothing more, nothing less. It is a tool. It is neutral, neither positive nor negative by nature, but rather dependent upon our attitudes, approaches, and actions.