Hello twitter! From tool to 'affordance'

In the context of my research on the influence of (micro-)blogging on participatory development practices, I signed up to twitter several months ago, in order to follow a number of influential (micro-)bloggers. Personally, I perceived twitter as what I half-jokingly described to one research respondent as 'narcisitic babble'. In fact, blogger Ewen wrote a nice post on the ego-tripping potential embedded in social media, containing the memorable quote 'there's an I in twitter and a me in social media'! (see also Naaman et al., 2010). From this perspective, I really never thought it was worthwhile to 'tweet' myself.   

image from justinparks.com

Then one morning I attended a conference which was all about knowledge, change and engagement in development processes.