Tag: Twitter

June 13, 2009

Sullivan: “The Revolution Will Be Twittered”

One of the smartest things I’ve read today about the growing disturbance in Iran comes from Andrew Sullivan who writes:

That a new information technology could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times. It reveals in Iran what the Obama campaign revealed in the United States. You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.

Not only can people now bypass the established media and broadcast to one another I think that they have proven that they will and that when they do so they will do it with force.

Furthermore, I think that events like this go to show that the fascination with Twitter is more than just about Twitter, it’s more importantly about the medium of communication that it provides for. Perhaps Twitter provides the best current experience for this, but I think that the demand for such a form of communication will only grow as more people realize the power of organizing themselves.

April 23, 2009

Expanding the notion of link journalism

One of the things that I’m extremely interested in expanding at The Whitman Pioneer is the use of tools like Publish2 among the newsroom. I think that the potential for link journalism is tremendous and I definitely think that Publish2 is the best among what’s out there right now. However, I have a significant problem with it in terms of how applicable it is to the future of news.

Expand Editorial Standards

Publish2’s website states that: “Free Publish2 accounts are available to journalists who maintain our editorial standards.” Furthermore, those standards read:

At a time when digital technology is rapidly transforming and expanding the practice of journalism, and allowing anyone to wield “the power of the press,” editorial standards are more important than ever. These standards are what separate journalism from marketing, PR, paid advocacy, or personal expression, which on the web are increasingly difficult to differentiate.

While I certainly agree that “digital technology is rapidly transforming and expanding the practice of journalism” I’ve come to steadily disagree with the idea that the solution is reassert editorial standards within the journalism community.

We’ve come to live in a time when almost anyone can break a news story with Twitter or their blog and where others can provide HD video coverage of an event with something that fits in their pocket. Due to this, I think that the extension of the editorial standards into civil society is more important than ever.

How does this factor into the future?

I have a hard time foreseeing a future for newspapers if they do not rely heavily upon their communities for contributions. While letters to the editor, guest columnists, and other means of involvement are great I think that the greatest potential is building a newspaper site that incorporates stories from the entire community.

Personal blogs, independent papers, art magazines, etc. all make up the coverage of a community and all carry the potential to add to the worth of a local paper. Sure, a journalist could link to this content with Publish2 and get it onto the paper’s site that way, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the community.

How much more interested in a local paper would a community be if it knew that it could submit links that would be included on the site? Sure, this could be accomplished with Delicious but it would be easier with a link-sharing tool that focusing on news stories.

Does it defeat the purpose of Publish2?

While I recognize the role that limiting membership in Publish2 to journalists plays I don’t think that expanding membership opportunities would detract from their purpose.

If the concern is that the quality of stories linked to would deteriorate then that shows an alarmingly low respect for the general news-reading community. The great thing that Publish2 has that Delicious and other tools don’t is the quality of stories. I sincerely doubt that by opening up Publish2 the quality would degrade.

Ultimately I have a hard time conceiving of the rationale behind limiting Publish2 to journalists. It certainly creates a nice little community of journalists, but so did the institutions of the old model of journalism that is collapsing by the week.

By expanding the possibilities of Publish2 the diversity of stories linked would rise and the utility of the service to news orgs would be drastically increased.

Postnote: Don’t get me wrong, I really love Publish2 and the service it offers. My hope is that the above didn’t come off too harsh and that it’s simply taken as advice for how to move the service forward. To see some of the great examples of how newsrooms are already making use of Publish2 you can see their examples page.

April 7, 2009

Can Twitter promote politically active communities?

Having just read parts of “Bowling Alone” by Robert Putnam for a class on Democratic Theory the topic of how social groups can stimulate civic engagement and political action has been fresh on my mind.

Part of Putnam’s basic premise is that community groups like the Elks Lodge, bowling leagues, etc. can create environments within which people feel more compelled to become engaged in their community and in politics. Furthermore, he sees current generations as severely lacking in their membership to these groups.

While Putnam doesn’t spend a tremendous amount of time (at least in the chapters that we read) discussing the role of new forms of community among younger generations we spent much of yesterday’s class discussing the role that Facebook has in creating a sense of community among people. Unfortunately we did not get into a discussion of Twitter because out of the 12 people I was the only one who had ever created an account and seen what Twitter was about.

Today, Peter Suderman at The American Scene posted an article titled “The Twitter Follow Racket”. In it he focuses a lot on the ways in which conservatives and corporations have dived right into to using Twitter and other new modes of communication. He writes that:

None of it seems terribly useful to me: Twitter-politics obsessives typically seem to inspire little more than added twittering about politics. It’s true that the right made it to this space first; but exploring new territory is only useful if you find and exploit valuable resources. People using Twitter for political activism are indeed doing something — but are they doing something useful? What does Twitter actually add?

While Suderman gets hung up on the way in which some people simply follow so many people that they could not possibly pay attention to anything but a small minority of those tweets he misses a significant point: it’s the size of Twitter that is part of what makes it politically useful.

If a politician has 10,000 followers and also follows thousands of people as well then yes, they (or their aide running the account) probably will not be able to actually read all of those tweets. However, if that politician wants to organize a rally, or encourage people to sign a petition, or simply discuss what he’s working on while in Washington it won’t take much to make an impact. Even if just 10% of the people read the tweet and pass it along to others, or in the best case, feel motivated to do something themselves, that’s still 1,000 people that were reached that may not have otherwise had any idea.

The sheer number of some people’s follower counts is certainly absurd, but that is not inherently wrong. It comes down to what I see as two distinct uses for the medium: individuals and everyone else. I want to use Twitter for the quality of information. I’ll follow enough people so that I can stay on top of what they’re posting and feel like I’m able to keep up with the information they’re putting out there.

A politician, celebrity, or corporation will want to use Twitter for a decidedly different purpose. They want the quantity of relations that it breeds. The biggest lesson I learned from Obama’s campaign is that sometimes being able to access a vast number of people is the most useful political weapon. If a politician can reach out to people in the thousands over Twitter then the question isn’t “What does Twitter actually add?” but rather, why aren’t more politicians using it?

March 16, 2009

The role of Twitter on campus

Having just finished a post for the CoPress blog about the Whitman Pioneer’s first real foray into covering breaking news on our website I started thinking about what the actual role for Twitter is on a college campus that is largely not using the service. At Whitman there are only a few dozen students that I know of using Twitter; even fewer are actually using it consistently. This became apparent when out of 1,200 visitors to our ski team article only 9 came from Twitter status updates.

Part of what makes working for a college newspaper so great is the sense that the paper works as a means for dispersing news for the community; it fills a role that Facebook, Twitter, local newspapers, and more fill partially but not completely. Thus, I see the role of Twitter for a college newspaper as largely being about alerting the community to breaking news, website features, etc. The problem comes when that community is not using Twitter.

The Pioneer has 50 followers on Twitter, but only a few are actually a part of the Whitman community and thus, the majority are not going to necessarily be interested in the daily happenings of the college. This raises the question of what we should really be using Twitter for. Should it be a means of updating Whitman-specific information, or a mode of alerting others to interesting content that may be outside of the Whitman spectrum?

I’m sort of stuck on this question. It seems that most other college news organizations are using Twitter to send updates about campus-centric information; this would be great if people at Whitman actually used Twitter. Since they don’t I’m wondering what people out there have done with their newspaper Twitter accounts if their community is not using it. I’d love to hear ideas.

March 8, 2009

Beyond the “Social Network”

Dara Lind from The American Scene posted an interesting piece yesterday in response to another article concerning the rise of Facebook. In it she examines the more theoretical aspects behind the service that both Facebook and Twitter offer.

She writes of how norms of communication and interaction have developed around each one, but that at this point Facebook has a more regimented system through which users interact. Lind uses the comparison of the difference between “unfriending” some on Facebook and “unfollowing” them on Twitter. The former seems to be a direct slight at the friendship while the latter is more informal.

At the very end of the piece she writes that:

This makes Twitter often feel more intimate than Facebook, in fact — the size of the audience may vary, but it’s always a friendly one. Maybe it goes a little too far in this respect, preventing followers from pushing back against users who mix interesting and uninteresting content. But as the site continues to develop, I wouldn’t be surprised if users deliberately changed the way they used Twitter to implement norms that favored consistently compelling Tweets. This is the other thing it’s useful to remember when talking about this kind of site: it’s absurd to talk about how the site “is used” as if individual users have no agency. The question is how individuals use the site, and which kinds of use the company running the site facilitates.

The point made about focusing on how individuals use the site and which kinds of use that site facilitates is a good one, but her earlier point concerning Twitter users developing more strict norms to keep the content compelling is a little off base.

First, there’s already a mode through which users can keep the content that they follow relevant and compelling: it’s the fact that they choose who they follow. Think someone’s tweets are boring and irrelevant, don’t follow them. Furthermore, there are certainly ways of “pushing back against users who mix interesting and uninteresting content.” Plenty of people complain (both over Twitter and on personal blogs) about the ways some users, @guykawasaki for one, tweet.

Personally I find all this talk of how Twitter or its users need to implement more structured modes of interaction to be ridiculous. Most of what I love about Twitter is that it’s so wide open to however you want to use it. Creating more rigid forms of interaction between users isn’t going to further this openness, it’s going to constrain it.

March 1, 2009

Evan Williams on the unexpected uses of Twitter

Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, discusses how much of what is driving Twitter’s growth over the past year is unexpected uses. The talk was given last month at the TED talks. Very interesting, and be sure to watch all the way through to the end for what I think is one of the biggest selling points of using Twitter.