As soon as I publish this post I’m going to head over to Twitter and send out the link with my 20,000th tweet. Here was my first.

@mikejonesmelb first tweet

Accurate, but otherwise not an auspicious start. Those who follow me will also note I’m still using the same profile picture. I will leave it up to you to decide whether this qualifies as ‘effective branding’ or simply laziness.

Over the past few years Twitter has become a significant part of my life. There is a tendency sometimes to think of social media as time wasting, as something you do instead of life; and many (me included) use the acronym IRL (in real life) when talking about meeting people offline. So as I pass the 20,000 milestone it’s a good time to write a little about my own time in the wonderful, expansive, and sometimes infuriating Twitterverse.

Like many, I started slowly. With almost no followers, and following a short list of large organisations, archives, libraries and a few friends and colleagues, it was difficult to get a timeline flowing, let alone any steady interactions. I dipped in and out, each time shrugging and moving on.

Then, in March 2012, I attended the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (AADH) in Canberra. There were many people there I knew, and lots of tweeters, so I threw myself into the hashtag and it was a revelation. I expanded the list of people I was following (and my own list of followers gradually started to grow), held online conversations during and between sessions with people I had never met, and watched as sessions were enhanced or critiqued with a flurry of references, links and interactions on the Twitter backchannel.

Following the AADH conference, I started to visit Twitter nearly every day. Aside from a few friends, my main focus was professional, and my Following/Followers lists remain skewed toward archives, libraries, museums and galleries (GLAM), as well as historians, academics and researchers of various sorts. With very few exceptions I don’t follow bands, musicians, writers, actors, or other ‘famous people’, mostly because they clutter up my timeline; and I get most of what I need from the people I follow already.

I continue to use Twitter professionally, to find out about developments in the GLAM sector, interesting research, blog posts and articles, and to build professional networks. There are colleagues I have met as a result, and colleagues I am keen to meet when I have the opportunity. I have talked about project ideas, sought advice (and given it), found help, and become involved in paid work, all as a result of online interactions. Plus I still tweet frequently at conferences, both as a way of engaging with others and to capture notes and links I can refer to later; and I regularly follow the hashtags of conferences I am unable to attend.

Perhaps most significantly, I gradually revealed more of myself. Now I don’t only tweet about work, archives and study – mine is a hybrid professional/personal account, including tweets about music, politics, social issues, travel, and whatever else is happening in my life, punctuated by the occasional multi-tweet rant. I have built an online network of people I socialise with, including a growing number I have subsequently met offline, and there are a number of people I am yet to meet face-to-face who I interact with more frequently than I do with my family and nearly all my ‘non-Twitter’ friends.

I have talked, shared, joked, laughed, and cried, just as I have been angered, maddened and saddened by the way some people act, on Twitter and off. All of which sounds like RL to me.

@mikejonesmelb