Find Your Tweeps

For my next homework assignment for Humanities 101, I needed to find two experts in a field I am interested in and follow them on Twitter. I am interested in a lot of different things so I was having a hard time narrowing down what to search for. But then I decided to use the class as a starting point and that led me to think of Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is the psychologist who gave the TED talk, “The Demise of Guys?” and co-wrote a book by the same name. I am interested in following Zimbardo (@PhilZimbardo) because the information he shared in his talk really spoke to me. I believe he put a lot of thought into his ideas and did quite a bit of research, as well. For another assignment, I looked into Zimbardo’s research and I found most of it came from extremely reputable sources. Zimbardo himself could be thought of as a highly reputable source. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, has been the President of the Western Psychological Association and President of the American Psychological Association. He also has taught at Yale, Columbia, and NYU, has received many awards, and hosted a television show on PBS titled “Discovering Psychology”.

The second expert I decided to follow isn’t an expert; it’s a team of them. Ars Technica (@arstechnica) is a technology magazine started in 1998. In 2001 it became the first magazine to offer a digital subscription and was also the first to become available in digital forms and as an eBook. The thing that really stood out to me about Ars is that they aren’t “just” about technology. The name Ars Technica, Latin-derived, means art in technology. They are about “…news and reviews, analysis of technology trends, and expert advice on topics ranging from the most fundamental aspects of technology to the many ways technology is helping us discover our world.” This isn’t something I would have found interesting before this class, but now that we have been introduced to Web2.0 and have been learning about all the different ways technology is redefining popular culture, I want to know more.