Facebook's Little Sister Twitter Analysis

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Sara Ridenour, during her time at the University of Texas at Arlington as a graduate student in the department of Sociology, made an effort to distinguish between the various effects of different aspects of Twitter in the lives of ordinary people in the third chapter of her thesis entitled, “Facebook’s Little Sister, Twitter”. She not only discusses the effects but, she also compares the positives with the negatives and explains how the former outweighs the latter. Although Ridenour presents some very strong arguments, there are some ideas that she fails to convey to her readers in a clear and meaningful way and others that seem to be quite far from reality, leaving a void in her argument as a whole.

Sara argues that Twitter is altering the way of communication that the people of the world use to interact with others in the following words, “Life is now played out in sound-bytes, quick hits of information delivered in headline fashion.”(Sara,5) This is quite an accurate description of how …show more content…

However, she doesn’t do a great job of using logos as she links the outside information she provides with her own beliefs. Ridenour suggests that counselors advise people to write a journal in order to get through tough times in life. She continues on with this idea by forming a connection between a private journal and Twitter and expressing her thoughts on how Twitter can serve the same purpose as the journal many counselors talk about. This argument is unreasonable as there could be more than one outcome of journaling on Twitter since the information being shared no longer remains private property. Private journaling does serve as a healing process for many and the main reason is that a person is able to express his/her feelings without the fear of being exposed out in the open and this beauty of journaling is killed by