Twitter is a new form of social media for me.  After using it for a couple weeks now, I’m slowly starting to understand the ease of how information gets spread so quickly through retweets: it’s as simple as a button!  I think on other social media platforms, where connectivity and networking is still the main point, nothing is as purposed towards spreading info as Twitter is.

I chose to look at feeds that supported the hashtag #womenintech and decided to follow some popular women figures in tech, such as Vanessa Hurst (co-founder of Girl Develop It and Write Speak Code) and Rebecca Garcia (co-founder of CoderDojo and working at Microsoft).  These tweets generally fall into the categories of: articles that promote social change in attitude towards women in tech, events or opportunities for coding females, and photos that try to establish the fact that women are indeed participating more in the tech field.  What it all comes down to is awareness and encouragement.  Those two words describe the tone for these posts when I scroll through my news feed on my chosen topic.

From what I’m seeing, it’s best described in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, in our reading “Small Change – Why the revolution will not be tweeted.”  Twitter is a powerful but limited tool.  These posts that get propelled into the vast space of Twitter, I would not call vigorous activism.  Rather, to paraphrase Gladwell, when there is no organizational or systematic hierarchy, profound decisions simply can’t be made in the effort of a cause/issue.  On the other hand, social network activism is great for starting ripples (The Dragonfly Effect).  In the age of the Internet, there’s low risk involved with this and easy participation because of low commitment.  It’s definitely a place to start, if not the place to start.  More than anything, these posts educate the Twitter audience on the matter and make aware that a problem like this exists (and that efforts are being made).  Populating the feed with this information also loosens the stereotype of men being the sole population in tech.