The Birthplace of Twitter

In “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy” by Fred Turner, he depicts a timeline of how the virtual community came into existence using references to Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL. From what I understood the Whole Earth Catalog to be, it is a catalog of products that people could review but not purchase. It started off in print and then went to online form. The WELL modeled their site off of the Whole Earth Catalog, whereas large geographically dispersed groups of people could form a common link to each other. People who didn’t know each other were able to communicate about a variety of different products. This could be argued to be the birthplace of online social networks.

When reading this article, my mind kept wandering off to thinking about how this could have been the earliest form of Twitter. Especially when Turner quoted, “…it seems clear that many were acting from a mixture of motives and in a mixture of social contexts simultaneously.” Isn’t this what Twitter is? Some people use Twitter for professional use, others use it as a terminal to post comedic jokes, and others just use it as a way to stay connected to friends. I first had to get Twitter my sophomore year when my Business and Professional Communication instructor insisted that the entire class get Twitter for professional reasons. So as my bio is professional, I by no means use it "professionally". Most of my posts are pretty boring, but for some reason I continually Tweet. I enjoy it mostly for the fact that it gives me more of an online presence as well as being able to read tweet's from the variety of different people in the world of Twitter. Much like the WELL, I am following people who I don’t know and I have followers who don’t know me, but we are linked by a common interest.