Stevie Rocco: April 2008 Archives

Twitter continues to build community in the spaces I seem to be occupying more and more. I was first introduced to this space by Brad Kozlek way back in November of 2006. There was some flurry around this platform at PSU in early 2007, but after the TLT Symposium that year, it seemed to fall off for a lot of folks. This year, however, and again before the Symposium, it really seemed to take off. The community of users around PSU has grown significantly, and I have found connections between folks whom I might never have met otherwise.

Micala's Photo of Her Tweet Meet Nametag

The community spontaneously had what we are calling Tweet Meet yesterday at lunch. It grew out of an idea from James Endres Howell Tweeting a less-than-enticing meal last week. I'd just come from a very good lunch at a local Chinese restaurant, and we ended up deciding (again, via Twitter) to have a lunch there the following week. At that point, Dana Carlisle Kletchka suggested that the Twitnesses (James's term--and I love it) should also be able to come. And thus it began.

We ended up having 12 folks from around campus joining around a table at the same Chinese restaurant, discussing the nature of Twitter, community, and identity. The great part about this, at least to me, was that no one at the table knew everyone else at the table. Given that, there were still some surprising connections between people whom I never thought would know each other. The connections occurred in a myriad of ways, too, from having the same hairdresser to working on Second Life projects together, to meeting over other social networking technologies that might be used for students at Penn State, to just being Twitter friends.

Cole Camplese, who is teaching a graduate class on community, identity, and design, was there, and he talked a lot about how his students are finding the Twitter space a useful one to make deeper connections with each other, even though they occupy the same physical classroom for his class. This is the most useful thing I'm finding, as well--Twitter as a way to create and deepen connections that can also occur in the physical spaces I occupy.

Note: I still owe my post on the Symposium. Haven't forgotten, but just haven't gotten there yet. Maybe Twitter also appeals to me because 140 characters is a lot less pressure, huh?