Twitter & Intercultural Comm

Recently, Twitter, a leader in social networking, announced that they would be revamping the interface of their website. This facelift's main objective is to ease the actions of sharing videos and photos. This will allow its users to communicate with each other more effectively and efficiently, especially when it comes to overcoming communication disconnects, such as intercultural communication.
For those who don't know, Twitter is a free, public, social networking platform that allows users to "tweet" to their friends. A "tweet" is a 140 character long message that can be shared with the world and include a number of different tags allowing all the tweets in Twitter to be filed and viewed in virtually any category the users desire. Every user has a page with all of their tweets compiled on it among other things such as tweets directed at that particular user from virtually anyone.
With that, Twitter aims to help bridge the gaps between different cultures and groups of people. The Internet in general can help make the world smaller and provide an extremely efficient means of communication.
However, what sets Twitter apart from a standard email is that it allows someone to broadcast rather than message. It is public and anyone can comment on anything. This truly unique structure enables someone to talk to a celebrity, a political figure, or a company among many other entities. While one may presume Twitter is a young, hip, and superfluous product designed to cater for the younger masses, the Twitter population is vast, diverse and expanding, (at about 370,000 users per day) among the ranks of the 160 million users (Shiels, 2010), are some household names, such as Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Larry King, Miley Cyrus and Lance Armstrong. The best part is, communicating with these people is a breeze, and is as easy as sending a text message. This allows one to get an "inside scoop" as to what is going on in the pop culture, or political world.
Twitter is a... [continues]

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