Twitter takes College, classes by surprise

Author: Brian Fung

UPDATE: FOLLOW THE CAMPUS ON TWITTER: www.twitter.com/middcampus.

What do the Pentagon, the White House, Karl Rove and Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) have in common with National Public Radio, Shaquille O'Neal, Lance Armstrong, Jimmy Fallon, Coldplay, the United Nations and now, Middlebury College? They are all using the Web's fastest-growing social network, Twitter, to share news and ideas en masse at lightning speeds.

For many observers, Twitter - the microblogging service that runs on its users' pithy, 140-character messages - is an unknown quantity, something they've likely heard of but either haven't tried or don't have an incentive to use on a regular basis. Loyalists claim the tool has enriched their lives by helping them trade information and develop links to others through a unique form of expression. Critics charge that Twitter is yet another trendy Internet fad whose geeky users indulge their narcissistic tendencies and fuel a gradual cheapening of our personal interactions.

That fight hasn't played out at Middlebury - but surprisingly, not because it's behind the times as some College officials suggest. In fact, Twitter has fast been gaining traction at Middlebury as another way to connect to important constituents.

Middlebury's communications team made its first foray into the Twitter universe on March 11. Its inaugural post? "Women's hockey wins NESCAC title and will host NCAA Frozen Four." The post, or "tweet," also linked to a College press release.

That was roughly a month before coverage of the service exploded among mainstream media outlets. The New York Times wrote about Twitter twice in January. Then four times in February, seven in March and by the end of April, the Times had covered Twitter no fewer than 11 times that month alone. Similar trends are reflected almost universally among the Times' competitors. Middlebury isn't known for jumping onto technology bandwagons early. But this time, the College just might have beaten the clock.

Administrators are not the only ones using the technology. Today, the Middlebury Twitter community represents a broad cross-section of alumni, faculty, students and staff. It includes Mary Ellen Bertolini, associate director of the Writing Program; former lecturer in writing Barbara Ganley; a first-year neuroscience major; a junior living in Japan; an alum going through veterinary school; an LIS circulation manager; and the editor of "Middlebury Magazine." At least three other students have joined Twitter in the past week.

WHAT IS TWITTER?

Twitter is the collaborative brainchild of three tech whizzes - Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. In 2006, they teamed up to create a lightning-quick communication tool that could be accessed anywhere, even on mobile phones. The result of their work is often likened to the ubiquitous - and occasionally irritating - status updates on Facebook. But Twitter builds on the status update by allowing users to have conversations with it. What's more, Twitter users ("Twitterers") can re-broadcast somebody else's tweets to still more users by "re-tweeting" - the digital equivalent of saying, "hey, did you hear...?" Twitterers in this way can carry on a dialogue that's visible to other users who might also have something to contribute.

"Twitter is about connecting people and spreading ideas," said Ganley, who now works in social media full-time and has 723 followers tracking her tweets.

The growth in Twitter's popularity at Middlebury reflects wider trends in adoption of the tool. The social network's user base has grown by over 1,300 percent since last February - bringing its estimated number of users to more than seven million, according to a recent Nielsen study. Facebook, meanwhile, enjoys a clear advantage with over 39 million users, but ranks only sixth among social networking sites in terms of growth.

These numbers suggest the titillation over Twitter still has yet to reach its full potential. That's unusual, since groups and businesses are already leaping onto Twitter faster than you can say "tweet." Organizations like The Washington Post update their Twitter feeds 15 times a day or more. When has the corporate world ever beaten consumers at their own game?

Twitter's user demographics are equally surprising. The stereotype in our tech-savvy, Gen-Y society is that adults don't understand technology or are slow to adapt. But Twitter became popular almost exclusively among the 35-and-up crowd long before any college student started using the tool. In fact, says Nielsen, this age group still dominates the tweet-waves, composing roughly half of all users.

TWITTER AT MIDDLEBURY

Does exceeding expectations and breaking stereotypes make Twitter a revolutionary technology? That's debatable. Jason Mittell, associate professor of American Studies and Film and Media Culture, thinks Twitter may be a tool that's actually less robust than existing social media like Facebook.

"One thing I really dislike about Twitter is its single-stream interface," he said, referring to the way tweets are organized in reverse chronological order rather than by subject, making the tool less an organized messaging application than a constantly shifting jumble of links, thoughts, ideas and feelings. Though tweets can become searchable by subject once tagged with "#" - a powerful feature that, for example, caused the news about swine flu to spread "virally" in days - Mittell is still struggling to process the deluge of information Twitter brings.

Still, he and a handful of other faculty plan to incorporate Twitter into their courses next year. Leng Professor of International Politics Allison Stanger hopes to have every student in her Internet politics class get an account.

"You don't fully understand [these technologies] until you start playing around with them," said Stanger, "and that's how you understand their potential power - which is enormous."

Professor of Geography Guntram Herb recently used Twitter's search function (which grabs others' tweets in real-time according to your search terms) to illustrate how the anti-government demonstrations in Moldova in April were being organized. Protestors searched Twitter for "#pman" (the name of a city square) to find out where to show up. And they didn't just show up - they came in force.

"In this case, Twitter was a tool of empowerment," said Herb. "It was an edge against totalitarianism."

Twitter has no explicit purpose, but supporters agree that the lack of a guiding message has become one of the medium's greatest strengths. It has allowed users to experiment and develop uses for Twitter themselves.

"Twitter is many different things to many different people," said Worth Baker '12.5. "It can be another way of discovering content. It can be a method of communication. It can be a blogging tool. It can be a branding tool. You create your own uses for it. That's partly why it's so hard to explain."

Sarah Harris '11 remains unconvinced. "It doesn't feel real to me," she said. "Why do you have to be so economical with your language? Why should you condense your words? It's like linguistic fast food."

Yet for Ganley's 2007 creative nonfiction seminar, brevity was the point. Ganley had students write stories 140 characters at a time in groups.

"It forces you to clarify, to get to the core of your argument," said Ganley of the project.

TWEETING FORWARD

Middlebury College's debut on the Twitter scene (or Twitteronia, as Shaq calls it) is as much a learning experience as it is about connecting to people or sharing information.

"My professional relationships are getting deeper," said Director of Interactive Communications Tim Etchells '74. "I'm learning things about people I wouldn't have in a simple conversation. And we're all developing this ability to read and filter out the good stuff."

Middlebury's Twitter community remains fairly small for now, but in short - no pun - if the trend continues as it has these past several months, you'll hear about it. Maybe even in a tweet.

Follow this reporter at www.twitter.com/b_fung.