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By Jose Bigio —

Reflections on Twitter Speed Run

This past Sunday I attended a welcome party for Fractal University , which is a community of people teaching their community. As part of the welcome party there was a set of sampler courses you could do (if you want to see the full Spring Semester listing).

I choose to do the twitter speed run, which is taught by Priya Rose. Immediately one barrier that surfaced is the relationship that people have with social media. There was a guy there who only allows himself to see Twitter one hour a day. Then there was the teacher who was taking a break from Twitter. Although she did tweet throughout the time we were there.

The premise of the course is that you can have a lot of wonderful connections via Twitter, but in order to make those connections you have to be willing to interact with people, and generate content yourself. The exercises that we did were:

Setup:
1. Add a profile picture and bio

  1. Edit your timeline:
    1. Mute words you don't want to know about
    2. Follow people you like
  2. Download https://tweethunter.io/twemex

Assignments:

  1. Reply to 5 people (this ends up being more than 5 because it included people in my class)

  1. Tweet 5 times in a row about anything
  1. Reply to a tweet from someone in this group

This is included in the reply group!

  1. Write a thread on a blog post you like
  1. Make a moodboard
  1. Ask a question of your followers
  1. Make your first poll

Choose a do 100 things quest

Reflections:

The post people liked most was when I summarized the blog post "How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time" and mentioned the takeaway being the biggest mistake of people's career is being at their job too long. A few reasons why I think this post was the most successful are:

  1. I am building on top of good wording by the original author
  2. I may have learned about the article via twitter so may just be spreading something that is valuable
  3. The idea of leaving your job or staying at your job too long resonates with people
  4. Summarizing an article provides value

One of the posts that did the worst is the mood board. I didn't put a lot of effort into it. I didn't gather good ideas, and I think the result reflects that.

The post I had the most fun writing was the one about my brother. Today I saw this:

One reason chat messages are unusually lively is that the format encourages you to write from emotion. You are talking to someone you like and you want to resonate with them, you want to make them laugh. This creates a surge in the writing. It is lovely. When you write from your head, your style sinks back under the waves. - https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/start-a-blog

and I think talking casually about the funny things my brother says to me evokes that emotion.

Ultimately if I spent more time on twitter I would have more followers. However, I think twitter is serving it's purpose quite well in terms of connecting me with organizations like Fractal, letting me learn about events like the perpetual stew, and providing me with comic relief.

Also as I was surrounded by new people focusing on this twitter speed running assignment I couldn't help but feel disconnected from the people that I was surrounded by. Social media can be a good tool to connect us with others, but once we are in the presence of others we should enjoy our time together!

You may have noticed that my do 100 challenge is based on this blog! From that same article above I'll add a few other quotes that stood out to me:

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution—write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

In regards to chat messages being more lively:

This, however, is not an excuse to be lazy in your thinking. You have to put your thoughts in order. But the time to do this is before you write for publication. Think: musicians practicing hard so they can be in the moment when they improvise. Read, take notes, study, question yourself. But then, when writing a post, let that go, and rely on the brain power you have accumulated. A good essay is an interesting mind wrestling with a problem in somewhat real-time. (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)

and apparently a do 100 challenge mention!

Write a hundred pieces. Each time take one thing and make it better: a better title, better structure, better ending, better descriptions, better dialogue. Just one thing. It adds up.

I definitely need to work on a few things in my writing such as:

  1. Keeping it simple / focusing
  2. Organizing the writing / doing a tiny bit more editing

Anyway I am going to throw down the challenge to my brother, since he recently got new speakers I'm going to say he should make 100 songs although feel free to scope this down to one of these:

  1. 100 verses
  2. 100 choruses
  3. 100 beats
    1. 100 melodies
    2. 100 bass lines
    3. 100 drum patterns


Doing 100 of some of these might be boring, so feel free to mix and match! Happy to brainstorm 100 challenges with my other readers!

I would also like to do something like write 100 computer programs, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon!

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