In these days, Twitter is one of the most popular global social network. There're many users around the world. You can follow anyone's daily life by following his or her Twitter account. Absolutely, There're also many kind of users; your friends , your favourite singer , celebrity etc., but what if your following users irritate you and you don't want to unfollow them?
According to
"Twitter tries out 'mute' feature for irritating tweets", Twitter is now trying out mute feature which we can mute anyone's tweets if you don't want to see them and you don't have to unfollow them to clear your Twitter's timeline. It's just like to secretly unfollow and the unfollowed won't know it.
I'm one of the Twitter users too, I have many friends who play Twitter because when we were freshmen, there's computer application class that the teacher said that we must created our user and followed our classmate at that time. so we were all followed. Moreover, I've used Twitter for 3 years so I can use it deftly. It's very useful social network because I can catch up with my friends and the other things such as horoscope and news. The news updating is such a real time news feed. Everything can be tweeted as much as you can in 140 letters message per one tweet. But sometimes it's annoying for me when someone tweets too much nonsensical tweets.
I couldn't deny that almost Tweetple (means Twitter users) can talk with themselves. It's not unusual because I used to do that too. Complaining with yourself is common here. So, everyday I see plenty of tweets which are all about talking to themselves. When I read someone's tweet and I don't like it, I skipped them.
It's a great news for me that Twitter has a mute feature. It'll be useful to skip somebody's grumpy tweets and to read only what I'm really want to read. But what if someone mutes my tweets? Maybe I could understand them because It isn't everyone that wants to read all of my stories. so I must be careful what will I tweet about and what will it be if my tweets annoy some users. whatever, we tweet what we are.
Twitter tries out 'mute' feature for irritating tweets. (2014, May 2). BBC News technology. Retrieved May 5, 2014 from
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27249566
I love the title "To Mute the Birds," but perhaps not for the reason Van wrote it. As soon as I saw it, I was reminded of George Orwell's short novel Animal Farm. In this story, Orwell uses the verb to mute, but with a meaning that is very unusual: it is not listed in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, or most standard English dictionaries. And if it is listed in your usual dictionary, I would wonder if you are using the most suitable dictionary.
ReplyDeleteThis is the sentence in Orwell's novel:
"All the pigeons, to the number of thirty-five, flew to and fro over the men's heads and muted upon them from mid-air; and while the men were dealing with this, the geese, who had been hiding behind the hedge, rushed out and pecked viciously at the calves of their legs" (Orwell, 2010, chapter 4, parap. 7).
So, what does the verb mute mean here?
And how well do you think it fits the ideas in Vann's blog post? I thought it added an interesting new perspective on both Vann's chosen article and her own response.
Reference
Orwell, G (2010, December 10). Animal Farm [Kindle edition]. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt (Original work published 1945).
And this conveniently brings me to the essay I mentioned in class this morning in response to Jan's use of the noun (or was it the verb?) bullshit. (When you know what mute means in Orwell's sentence in paragraph (para.) 7 of chapter 4, you will understand the connection my brain made.)
DeleteThe essay is On Bullshit, by academic Harry G. Frankfurt, who was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, one of the world's best, and whose press published it as a short book (2005). Despite the title, it's a serious piece of work, but also fun. I'm sure that Frankfurt had fun writing it to explore notions of commitment to truth underlying the belief, popular in some circles, though not philosophy, that truths, especially about moral questions, are culturally determined and all therefore equally true and of equal worth.
Reference
Frankfurt, H. G. (2005). On Bullshit. [Kindle edition]. Pinceton: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/
One more comment, then I'm going to watch a bit of Downton Abbey before sleeping.
DeleteI couldn't resist the temptation to do a bit more research, so also checked the Oxford Dictionaries website for the word mute - it does not list Orwell's meaning either.
The massive Oxford English Dictionary does. You need a subscription to access the OED, but I'll copy and paste the relevant definition tomorrow. It's the first of four definitions for the verb mute that the OED records - with the earliest recorded use dating from 1475, which is not exactly modern. I suspect that Orwell is the only writer for the last century or so who has used it as he does in the sentence I quoted above.
And this is perhaps also a good example of using some online dictionaries, for example, TheFreeDictionary.com does include Orwell's definition, and I think that could be a problem. Do you agree? Why or why not?
I've never played twitter before because I spent my time playing Facebook instead. All I know is they are both social community. In my opinion, it's a good thing to have mute function in Twitter. In Facebook, I got a lot of advantages from unfollow function, too.
ReplyDeleteI have my own twitter account but I don't usually play it because my friends don't play it and I don't know how to mute interesting or become popular. Personally, I prefer Facebook, Instagram instead. I accept that Twitter is useful when you want to spread out the news or something is emergency due to I asked my friend about how is useful of twitter. If you want to update about entertainments, twitter will help you a lot. Celebrities use twitter to communicate with their fans even some celebrities met the problem of twitter hack, and they still use Twitter contact with their fans or update their life, events.
ReplyDeleteThat is great news for me who is twitter addict. I know that twitter is free, everyone can tweet everything they want but sometimes, my friends retweet many things about what they interest but it annoyed me. So this new feature is very useful for me to hide them all and to be happy with my timeline.
ReplyDeleteI started using Twitter a couple of years ago, when it had already been very popular for a while. I hate using formally incorrect language, abbreviations and slang, so it's a real challenge to fit my ideas into 140 characters that are grammatically correct, unabbreviated English.
ReplyDeleteExcept that I don't like the look of it, it doesn't worry me that some Twitter users abbreviate massively (B4 I 8 dinner, ... - yuk!) and throw grammar out the window (is this even possible?), but I can't do it myself.