Using Social Media for Your Own Purposes.

I've been writing about Twitter lately, and I've noticed that a lot of times with social media sites, people don't necessarily use it the way it was intended to be used. For example, comedians will sometimes have conversations with each other that are clearly jokes, but are made to be seen as real conversations happening. Above is a prime example of this: two comedians, Tim Heidecker and Tom Scharpling talking on Twitter about a Hollywood meeting that isn't actually going to take place, but is purely for humorous purposes. By using the conversational aspect of Twitter, comedians and others are able to both make fun of the way the site is supposed to be used, and have a good time while at it. This is an animated video of the conversation they have on Twitter, which is clearly only for comedic purposes, but uses the site in a way that's different than how it's supposed to be intended. I think it's particularly interesting the way people end up using sites, compared to how they are supposed to be used. Another example of this is that there is a feature on Facebook that allows you to see when someone has read a message you've sent to them, but this is somewhat loaded in nature: if you can see that someone has read your message and they don't respond, you might take it to mean that they don't care or don't want to talk to you. Thus, people end up sometimes leaving their messages unread so that that "read" message doesn't show up and people aren't offended that they haven't responded yet, even though they've seen the message. It's interesting, because at times there seems to be a contradiction between what the creators of a site think people want and what they actually want: in this example, they think that people want to know when their message has been read, but really people probably don't like this feature because it makes them look like a jerk if they don't respond right away.