I use Twitter a lot. It’s helped my career immensely, tided me over when I was in jobs that didn’t fit, as well as helped me worked out ideas about life, my career and my industry at all hours of the day. Even though I am a woman who is a visible minority and a heavy user of the site, I have been lucky enough to avoid harassment and threats for most of my time on the service.
I also write a lot of Tweetstorms, or Twitter essays. The format, popularized by the writer Jeet Heer, is one I use on occasion because it often feels like less pressure than sitting down to write something here in WordPress. I never know how long they’ll be in advance. And it’s fun repeatedly trying to fit something useful or interesting into 140 characters in a coherent line of thought.
I’m going to start publishing more Twitter essays here, old and new, mostly because it’s good to have an archive of this stuff somewhere and it’s easier than pointing people at one tweet and telling them to scroll through Twitter’s sometimes clunky user interface.
So here’s the first one. It’s tweets from a little under a year ago, before I knew that I was ever going to be accepted to Columbia, or even apply. Before I was published in The Walrus or Canadaland, but soon after the Jennifer Pan story in Toronto Life took off.
There have been a lot of problems on the site since I wrote this, especially how Leslie Jones was treated following the release of the Ghostbusters reboot. But for the most part, I still feel the same way.
Karen K. Ho 