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Originally Posted by mum21andtwins  ok I'm going to make an idiot out of myself but
What?? none of the made any sense to me 
Could you enlighten me to twitter. I had a look at it months ago and it looked like just another annoying thing to keep on top of. how does it work and why can it benefit lactivism? |
Not an idiot question at all! I was highly resistant to social media in all forms. A work project required my being on MySpace for a while and I found that incredibly creepy (no offense to those who love it - just wasn't for me).
Twitter is all in how you use it. For some it is a way to stay in touch with the minute by minute activities of friends and family. Again, for me personally, that would be just a huge time suck - but I am with my kids all the time. If I had a child away at college, I might use it that way.
Political uses of Twitter became more clear to me after the Motrin ad campaign. I'm sure there is a thread somewhere here about it. Basically, Motrin put out an ad that described breastfeeding as so painful you needed Motrin. Offended moms (and others) on Twitter started sending outraged Tweets to each other and quickly added the hashtag #Motrinmoms. The volume of negative feedback was picked up by the many services that monitor keyword trends on Twitter. Within a day or so Motrin pulled the ads with a huge apology and the whole story of how Twitter discussion could so quickly change how a company behaves was in the New York Times.
So I buckled and opened a Twitter account. At first it seemed like a mass of unorganized babble - who do you "follow?" where are the people talking about the things I am interested in? Slowly I have figured out that it is an evolving process and different groups are designing way to find each other. One way is to include a hashtag (like #bfing) to the end of a Tweet you think would interest other people who follow breastfeeding news. People interested in breastfeeding news can search by the hash.
Using something like a Tweetdeck allows you to divide your incoming Tweets and automatically converts links (and exchanging links is, for me, the number one reason to be on Twitter - links=fast access to breaking news and commentary in the areas that interest you) to TinyURLs so you can get a real message plus a link into 140 characters.
Also people Tweet from conferences I can't make it to and court arguments (like the Ohio Supreme Court argument this morning on whether breastfeeding discrimination is sex discrimination).
So for lactivist purposes, Twitter can be a very quick source of everything you might want in real time. We all can't read every paper, be at every conference, hear about everything. With Twitter, you have a huge amount of people operating as a sifter for you.
Some of it is annoying. For reasons I can not understand, a bunch of people I respect on certain political topics are also addicted to American Idol. So I scroll past all the Tweets about that.
Hope that helps.
: but Twitter can augment lactivist work. With a hashtag - and I am using #breastfeeding until someone tells me there is a better one - we can find each other more quickly.
I like the proposal to use #bfing and I am going to start transitioning. 
