Thursday, January 28, 2016

Twitter and What I Found There

This blog will explore the twitter-sphere of veterinary science.

Q: What kinds of things do people on Twitter seem to be talking about, debating, arguing about or otherwise engaging in meaningful exchanges of ideas about? 
A: Most of the things people seem to be talking about with regards to veterinary science on twitter is mostly high school students being accepted into college to pursue veterinary science. There do not seem to be any debates or arguments regarding the topic or if there is it is not tagged "veterinary science". Other tweets I found were mostly colleges putting their programs on the map or programs that veterinary science majors and pursuers can look into.

Q: In your opinion, what are the two most interesting conversations or stories you found in the Twitter feeds? 
A: The most interesting twitter feeds I was able to find were @VeterinaryScience   and @PamelaGrierPhD. The former is an veterinary science information account. It provides its followers with small facts about animals and veterinarians themselves along with providing definitions to some veterinary terms. The latter is a personal account of a woman named Pamela Grier. The interesting thing is she is an actress who has an interest in veterinary science. She occasionally posts about dogs and them getting new homes. I am assuming she was one of the most popular veterinary science posters due to the fact that she has 580K followers.
I kind of expected to not find a huge amount on veterinary science on twitter considering most debates and arguments are on a more popular topic like engineering. I am a little disappointed at how little discussion I was able to find.

Q: Overall what impression do you get of your discipline based on what you saw happening on Twitter? Were the people in these feeds talking in ways you expected or did not expect, about things you anticipated they'd be talking about or things you had no idea they'd be discussing? 
A: I got the impression that my field is not fully immersed in twitter. It seems as though there is a lot of pull to get high schoolers or college students early in their career to choose veterinary science but not a lot after that unless you google the subject. I expected to find more discussion about animal cruelty or first hand accounts from veterinarians about their journeys or their struggles.

ep_jhu. "Turtle Rescue" 08/31/2014 via flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

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