Photo by photographer padawan

The assortment of solitary practitioners, diviners, new agers, pagans, heathens, Asatru, chaos magicians, scholars, runemasters of various degrees (etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum)… well, they’re not the most ‘centralized’ bunch. I’ve seen forum after forum and blog after blog centered around the runes fail and fall into neglect and decay. Well, I believe I may have solved the problem; but I’ll need your help. I’ll explain more as we go along.

Whether you consider yourself a total novice or a complete Rune-Master the like of which Thorsson and Ragnar can only dream of someday becoming, you are openly invited to contribute to this social experiment.

Twitter!?

The media all over is abuzz about Twitter, and until recently I couldn’t think of any use for it at all. But because I was procrastinating on research of a contemporary Ansuz analysis, I recently decided to ignore my general mistrust of internet hype and give it a closer look. I knew that Kaedrich Olson (“Runes for Transformation“) was using it in combination with Facebook, and both of our Facebook experiments were turning out to be a success, so… perhaps there was something here?

My main question was: “How can Twitter benefit people trying to learn and apply the runes?”

The Difference: Twitter vs. Forums, Blogs and Facebook.

Why have our rune-centric communities failed time and time again? I believe the answer to that is that there are a great deal of solitary practitioners, and there are a fair helping of groups, whose views and sources all differ, and whose geography is prohibitive to true connection. We are so scattered across the board that a mere forum or Facebook group is too small and isolated a thing to take off. Blogs too suffer from lack of audience, comments that don’t get approved and a universal struggle with writers and writer’s block.

Twitter is simple. Twitter can be completely anonymous. It’s about the conversation, not one voice, one site or one person. It allows us to remain autonomous and separate (the way we often like it), have our own say, but listen to the voices of potentially hundreds. It allows us, at a glance, to grab onto new insights from across the world that may help us right now with something that’s been on our mind.

Twitter doesn’t suffer from the limitations of Forums, Facebook, Myspace, any given blog. It strips all of that away to the very core of what’s important: a concise thought, shared with others who have the same interest. And if that thought’s time has come… watch it spread.

So what is Twitter, anyway?

Twitter is very basic: it’s a conversation. It is like a status update, without the Facebook. You have people whose updates you follow, and people who follow your updates. There are various programs, plugins and addons that are built on top of this open technology. The one I use is called TweetDeck, but you can use Twitter through it’s website as well.

You can target certain updates at people using the ‘@’ symbol, for example: @runesecrets Keep up the good work!

You can target certain topics, such as #runes (or #runesecrets or #cats.. anything really) and when people search up those tags, they’ll get a list of who contributed to the conversation.

You’ll find a plugin I’ve included at the footer of the blog that shows the Rune Secrets twitter stream, which I will update much more regularly than the blog. Hopefully we can turn it into a massive conversation.

A conversation about what, exactly?

That’s up to us. There is a limit on the length of a single status update of 140 characters. This forces us to be concise, and express one clear thought about one thing. This is ideal when we have a brief revelation about a rune that we want to share. For instance:

Ansuz Reversed: The limits of language. Parts of human experience that can never be put into words. Some things are forever unspoken. #runes     (about 13 hours ago via TweetDeck)

Or:

Re: ISA – The stasis or slowing of molecules that results in gas > liquid > solid. Water > ice. Energy > matter. Mind > ego/self. #runes      (about 24 hours ago via TweetDeck)

Have something to say about that? Include the tag ‘#runes’ in your message and it will be listed along with all of our thoughts.

Want to link to something? Use bit.ly or another URL shortener to save space on your 140 character message. This is useful when you have a blog post to announce, or want to share a resource. For example, http://runesecrets.com/rune-meanings/othala-rune-meaning-analysis is rather long. But if you shorten it at bit.ly, you get http://bit.ly/947I2Q.

You can also re-tweet other people’s messages to share with your own group of followers. For instance, I may post that Rune Secrets has a new article up. I’ll soon include a retweet button (or you can do it on the Twitter site or TweetDeck) that will re-post the message to your stream.

Sign up at Twitter.com and then download something like TweetDeck. In TweetDeck, you can even add and remove columns. To focus the experience, remove the ‘suggested’ column and add a #runes column (using the (+) symbol in the top left of the app).

You won’t need much proof as to the power of this social experiment. Just give it a try!

Conclusion:

The simplicity and concision of this tool is powerful, especially when dealing with the contemplative and meditative aspects of the runes . A restrictive 140 character limit on each message forces you to express your thought with clarity and understanding, which means it will not only communicate well to others, but will be clear and focused in your own mind.

It is a blessing to writers too, because the topics and thoughts, limited on twitter, become that much more imbued with the necessity of exploration. The more of us who get going on #runes and #runesecrets, the more we bring the runes, real-time, into our life.

Sharing resources is also a huge part of this. Have you posted something up in an obscure unvisited forum? On your personal blog? Found some images? Simply add the link to #runes and suddenly anyone following that tag will be able to find it. This has the potential to link our individual efforts up a lot better, without having to centralize.

Go ahead, try it! Join the social experiment. I’m looking forward to more ways of interacting with a rune-centric community across the globe.

Hope to see you there,
Sincerely,

Tyriel

Sign up now and join the #runes conversation.

Download TweetDeck free, to powerfully manage the Twitter medium.

You can now find the most recent comments at the very bottom of each page, and you can now follow Rune Secrets on Twitter, and share articles on any of the hundreds of social networking sites using ‘Add This’ at the bottom of each article. Easy printing and emailing features still exist for your convenience!

Enjoy, and thanks for supporting this project with your readership!