On May 21, 2008 many Twitter users participated in a Twit-Out in protest to the many problems the service has been having recently. In response Sarah Perez, of ReadWriteWeb, wrote How to Use Social Media for Social Change. Sarah thought that the anger users were displaying toward the Twitter outages and instability could have been directed in a more positive manner toward social causes.
I was pleased to see this article because I was feeling the same sentiment. I am addicted to and dependent on Twitter but it is a free service. And then I think about everything going on in the world and realize that Twitter hiccups are trivial in light of war, famine, food and gas prices, and the degradation of the environment. Personally, I’m trying to stay focused on the big picture
Postings on Twitter, however, are just a, hopefully, small part of an individual’s life and just because someone is complaining about outages doesn’t mean she isn’t involved in social causes. It just starts to seem that way when all the tweets are twitter complaints and not complaints about the environment and social injustice.
