Reflection on Topic so Far

I think I am finally starting to have a strong idea on how to present my theory and what to focus on. As I have noted numerous times before I will be focusing on the social networking site Twitter and specifically on authorship that surrounds Twitter. When I originally started this project I honestly did not know that much about Twitter. I was familiar with the site because I was introduced to it when I was watching a talk show one day and I thought it was interesting that I could “follow” certain celebrities. I created a Twitter account and occasionally checked it to see what celebrities were up doing. However, I never used it to post my own thoughts. Now that I have been researching Twitter for several weeks, I have come to realize it has become a huge phenomenon within this multimedia world. Twitter is being used by celebrities, athletes, doctors, professors, students, companies, and everyone in between. Twitter has made its way into classrooms, sporting events, and even surgery rooms. It is truly amazing what Twitter, a text of 140 characters, can offer us. Professors are using it to send out homework reminders, coaches are using it to relay information about sports teams, companies are using it so send information to customers, and the most fascinating of all doctors are using Twitter to allow patients’ family members to follow their progress while in surgery. Not only are people using Twitter to relay information, but writers are even releasing their novels via Twitter or using Twitter messages to create and publish books. “Twitter Wit” was a book that was recently released in book stores and was creating by solely using other people’s wittiest “tweets”. Even though this book used other people’s tweets, they never received credit for the book. This brings me to the idea of multimedia authorship. What makes someone an author? This project has made me think about the idea of an “author” in this thriving multimedia world. With all of the tools available on the Internet, almost anyone can be an author. So when people use Twitter to post their thoughts, are they ultimately an author? Well when we see books like “Twitter Wit” being published it appears that these innocent thoughts are eliciting bigger and better pieces of writing than ever imagined. Not only are books being published using Twitter, but other websites are using Twitter for the basis of their site. For example, thelongestpoemintheworld.com is a site that takes anonymous statuses and generates a rhyming poem. No one has given this site permission to use their individual status, yet it is taken and used to create a collaborative piece of writing. There is even a Twitter Search, which is set up just like Google.com, where you type in a word or phrase and see whose statuses match. Sites like these are allowing people’s thoughts to be spread anonymously around the Internet. This brings me to believe that as a multimedia author we have no identity. As soon as we let our thoughts and words loose on the Internet, all identity is lost. I feel like it is inevitable for others to see what I have written and never be able to trace it back to me. Once I post my thoughts they seem to never be my own again but become part of a larger collaborative piece of multimedia writing. This project has opened my eyes to just how easy it is to steal someone’s writing and words completely unintentionally. With so many people using Twitter and updating their statuses multiple times of day, there is a large amount of information people are releasing onto the Internet. We never will truly know where our thoughts are going to end up. It is just something we must deal with when we let our thoughts be expressed over the Web. We must realize being a multimedia author means contributing to a larger piece of work.