The inception of online technology has led to the creation and development of a myriad of online platforms. Twitter is a popular social platform in the world today, and there is no doubt that it has social and non-social impacts.
In line with its social impacts, Twitter plays an integral role in the provision of information to the public, particularly its users; it enhances social connection, and it also provides a sense of identity or purpose of the user to network effect (Kwak et al 27). In fact, the number of online interactions and connections has increased significantly with more people embracing Twitter as an online social platform. Moreover, still on the social impacts, through learning Twitter’s interface, users become integrated socially. It is notable that more time and effort that could be spent elsewhere is dedicated to Twitter by its users.
Conversely, Twitter has several non-social impacts on individuals, organizations, and society. First, for individuals, Twitter provides entertainment, and most of its users have fun while using it. Second, for society, Twitter is used for reviewing products or public goods, and it has numerous encyclopedic pages that provide important and useful information to the members of society. For organizations, Twitter’s non-social impact is evident in the fact that it provides product improvement services, allows product design, and is a vital online platform for knowledge management (Diaz-Ortiz 5). Twitter also makes computations possible, and this is underlined by the fact that it has since its inception been used to match people with content and to determine reputations. Twitter users have incurred costs in accessing and using the platform, and these include navigation and interruption costs. Navigation cost enables users to get to the site with the aim of seeing the collection of interactional possibilities whereas interruption cost interrupts or pulls an individual from actual duties to see the site’s collection of interactional possibilities (Diaz-Ortiz 13).
Works Cited
Diaz-Ortiz, Claire. Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet at a Time. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011. Print.
Kwak, Haewoon, et al. “What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?.” Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web. ACM, 2010.