My Twitter Experience

So as all of you may know, Twitter has been around for a long time now and it is nothing new. I would not consider myself an avid Twitter user, however, this past year, I have been on it more often than usual. Prior to using Twitter for Writing 39C, I used it to spread any important news going on in the media or just for fun, but with this class, I have been instructed to use it solely for animal-related issues. I consider myself quite familiar and comfortable with retweeting things that are important to me so when it came to animals, I found myself more passionate and interested in the topics. This course required us students to follow at least 10 animal related organizations and 10 scientists/researchers, and of these 20 people we had to follow, I think the account I was most connected to was Oceana. This account is based on marine life and conservation and I have always been fascinated with the ocean. Since marine life is such a bread topic, this account has the ability to touch upon many issues, allowing it to be more useful to the public (rather than focusing on only one issue). I mainly think my interest in marine life began because the ocean is so unknown and the majority of our Earth is covered in these vast bodies of water. Upon retweeting and tweeting, I found that not many people talk about animal related issues and it is pretty shocking since each and every one of them play a vital role in our ecosystems, and when one becomes endangered, the whole ecosystem becomes endangered. Everything is connected to each other and I realized that a lot of people don't seem to pay attention to that. When I retweeted, I decided to mainly focus on major issues such as how marine life is being threatened by global warming as well as land animals being endangered. I chose to focus on these topics because, in my opinion, they are the ones that need the most attention right now. I wanted to use my platform as a positive influence to get important news out there. When I made my own original tweets, I focused more on issues that were not talked about a lot like the leak of wastewater in Tampa and a video on human ignorance towards ocean pollution. I personally did not see these things on television or on major news outlets and I think that is where the problem is. I had to deep dive into animal issues in order to find these topics, which really goes to show how the media lacks in their coverage anything that isn't politics or crimes. Overall, having a Twitter account focused on animal research and issues really opens my eyes to how careless and ignorant us humans are with our planet. We only get one planet and we have been treating it like it is dispensable.