Twitter: Spreading the Message!

After two days of presentations on quite an eclectic assortment of topics, I was rather overwhelmed with a new onslaught of information – some bizarre and incredible (for example, the escaped military-trained dolphins with sleeper darts on a mission to capture innocent swimmers) and some rather upsetting and not-so-new (PETA’s angry and slightly ineffective agenda). But after thinking about them all for a while, when reading this blog post, I realized that the topics are all interconnected to most of the subjects, and I was stuck wondering which ones to write about. It was after all of the twitter updates that held “tags” for spring jam that actually started this connection – the one between AIDS awareness and social networking. How quickly can information spread?

In the presentation on social networking, the focus was on the freelance twitter journalist, and the ways in which twitter was used to relay some very serious and important information. It struck me how amazing it truly is that there is a website in existence that, while seemingly innocent, can cause so much change and connect so many people in so many ways. The internet, in this respect, has always kind of amazed me. Twitter is a means of communication, hindered only by the 250 character limit per “tweet,” that has virtually endless possibilities. Through the use of “trends” that are added to the end of tweets, everybody with a twitter account is connected instantly into the conversation about any topic. In this presentation, they were discussing Egypt.

Curious, I logged onto Twitter (oh yes, long ago I succumbed to the temptation of Twitter, and, although hardly used, found it a great way to quickly look at people’s opinions on a number of topics – quite literally about anything possible) and searched for tags of “#HIV/AIDS,” “#AIDS Awareness,” “#Get Tested”. My search engine more or less exploded, and within twenty minutes while I left the search for “#HIV” up on my computer, I had 20 new unread tweets about the subject. There was an incredible amount of pure information and resources that stem from twitter, I discovered: for example, there are Twitter accounts titled “AIDS Life Cycle,” “GreaterThanAIDS” and “Aids Actions”. These are all places to go for resources, information, and ways to actively get involved in groups or organizations that are working to help this problem, or combat it in different ways. The Greater Than AIDS proclaims on the main page of its Twitter: "Greater Than AIDS is a new movement that responds to the continuing AIDS crisis in the United States." And the “Take Action” twitter, which is powered by Social Actions, allows users to "Get alerts of AIDS-related actions from 65 social action platforms." There were also a great number of tweets that contained the tag of “AIDS” that gave users websites containing anonymous forums where both infected and non-infected people can talk and discuss, share stories and work to support each other.

With the internet now more than ever, information is literally at everybody’s finger tips. Years ago, without websites such as Twitter, it would be difficult to search endlessly for places to turn or information on such a previously misunderstood disease. Now, with one simple search a person has millions of pieces of information and resources, in a completely anonymous and safe environment. The information is not just in existence, but it is literally spread quickly and effectively through this networking site. When new research presents itself, any person can instantly access it, and read about it in terms that make sense, without scientific language that can be difficult to understand. It is amazing what technology can do. The mere fact that there is enough easily accessible information on AIDS, or even any of the topics that were presented, to create a whole presentation that involved so many different statistics, timelines, information, organizations, etc. shows just how incredible of a resource something like Twitter, or any social networking website, is to our culture.

To see some of the super cool organizations that are involved with Twitter to help spread information about HIV/AIDS, here are some of the links:

http://twitter.com/#!/GreaterThanAIDS

http://twitter.com/#!/aidsactions

http://twitter.com/#!/AIDSgov
(This website allows users to get updates about information regarding HIV/AIDS that is released / current in the US)