The Twitter Finale

I can't believe this is my last “Twitter Update” blog post. The time went by so quickly and I feel like I just created my Twitter account yesterday in order to advocate for animal rights. Looking back, I realized what an amazing experience tweeting was and am glad I got to share it with the rest of my peers.

This week, I was able to incorporate some evidence and excerpts that I included in my Advocacy Project Essay into my Twitter tweets. I wrote about the dog euthanasia problem resulting from the excessive amount of dogs roaming the streets and located in animal shelters. I also noted how this cruel and inhumane process was originally meant to put down an animal who is in a great deal of pain. However, today, euthanasia is mainly used for human benefit and in an effort to decrease the dog population. After including these "problem" tweets in a thread, I also tweeted about some potential solutions such as implementing more affordable spay and neuter programs as well as signing petitions to stop the murdering of dogs.

Furthermore, I tweeted about certain aspects that helped increase my knowledge and allowed me to grow as a writer during this course. I specifically learned about the importance of peer review, multiple animals’ abilities and skills, the mistreatment that animals often experience, and how to effectively discover articles when conducting research. I even retweeted some of my classmate's tweets and provided my own thoughts on the matter. For example, I retweeted and responded to Britney Chung who tweeted about the importance of elephants in their various ecosystems. I agreed with her analysis that if elephants go extinct, the food chain would fall out of balance and ecosystems would begin to fail. Humans must realize that animals, such as elephants, play a huge role in today's society and that all animals must be respected and protected.

One step I was surprised I needed to complete was following any ten accounts that interested me or related to who I am as a person. Instead of following animal welfare accounts like I have been doing during this whole quarter, I mainly decided to follow engineering accounts. I did this because my goal is to major in electrical engineering. I even followed the UCI engineering Twitter account and learned some interesting aspects about engineering that I was initially unaware of, like the different classes that are available for me to take.

Twitter and other forms of social media can be very useful when it comes to education, expression, and advocating for a specific aspect a user deems important. Before this course, I never expected that social media could be used to complete research and learn about school related topics. This is because I always thought social media was only a distraction where people could scroll for hours, viewing funny and cute pictures and videos. Despite this, Writing 39C opened my eyes and caused me to notice that I can use social media as a place to learn useful things for my schoolwork. For instance, on Twitter, I learned much about animal intelligence, emotion, and communication as I began drafting my Literature Review Essay. I also used Twitter to discover some problems animals face as well as certain solutions that have been proposed for my Advocacy Project Essay. Moreover, I had the opportunity to read other people's thoughts about animal science and welfare and was able to compare it to my prior beliefs.

Based on my overall experience with Twitter, I am uncertain whether I will continue to use it once Writing 39C is done. This is because I already have other forms of social media, such as Instagram, and am worried all these social media apps will be a distraction and take too much of my time. I already occasionally notice myself scrolling through Instagram for long periods of time instead of getting work done. Despite this, I am still considering keeping Twitter to stay up to date with animal science and welfare policies since they are both very interesting topics that I have come to enjoy reading about.