Twitter? Meh. I don't get it. I don't want to get it. I don't like it. I don't want to like it.
No thank you.
Now, this isn't one of those blogs where I say - "Oh man - I'm a new person, I love Twitter. I have changed my opinion... I can't believe what I was missing." If that's what you wanted, sorry... let's save the revolutions for the end of the course, ay? Actually - what I wanted to talk about was that finally, something about Twitter does actually make sense. I don't really find it all that useful as a "social networking" with friends tool because my friend's aren't really vain enough to post tweets about what colour socks they are wearing - (facebook status updates, however...) but as a tool for citizen journalism? Bingo! I get it now!
Steven Johnson addresses this very notion in his article about How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live. I immediately felt an affinity with Steven as he echoed many of my cynical thoughts about Twitter and the phrase "ambient awareness" is actually a good one, in my opinion. As Ted mentioned in today's class, all of these Tweets when aggregated right, become "tiny chunks of content which form a coherent and dynamic narrative - a dynamic story is developing!" I had never really thought about Twitter being used in this way to be honest. It makes sense - the hash tag system suddenly becomes rather useful.
What does this mean for us? Well, it means that the culture of journalism and news reporting is changing radically. There is a shift from the news being something only people in "power" with the money and resources can distribute (at whatever angle they choose) - to something anyone with a computer or smartphone can distribute (again, at whatever angle they choose). The benefits? We find out news faster, due to a shorter feedback loop - the ordinary citizens don't have to go to "the boss" to make sure their article is OK to publish. They see something they think is newsworthy, press a few buttons, snap a shot and BAM IT'S ON THE INTERNET!
While the news used to be a finished commodity, which was polished up by the editor, printed and distributed to the masses in newspaper format - the news now becomes a flow of information, a flow of stories from a variety of sources and people who tell it how it is - how they see it - unfinished coverage and footage allowing for us all to participate, contribute, add and most importantly, consume.
I think this is a fitting change. After all, the world doesn't stop after an article is published. It continues. The people reported about continue living their lives. The news continues after the newspaper stops writing about it.
6 comments:
Hey! I totally agree with the usefulness of Twitter! When I first came across it, it really didn't seem too appealing as a platform for social networking. Everything is too restricted and forces shortspeak and shortlinks on everything, but thankfully this only fuels the quick citizen journalism of today.
I also think that mass amounts of citizen articles/reports certainly beat the legitimacy of "big name" news corporations. After all, the unanimous voices of thousands outnumber the voice of a gatekeeping media control center that may not even be true.
I agree with you Annie! I didnt want to know twitter either and my opinion on it hasn't changed but I agree that after this weeks reading the benefit of Twitter and meaning of the hash tag all makes sense now. As a social network its not great for me either (but the fact that I don't have friends outside of uni on twitter probably doesn't help) but as a method of citizen journalism its great.
It's great that individuals can now post news as it happens in order for news to be current and updated frequently it seems that platforms like Twitter are the way to go.
yeha its so good how quickly the news can be reported from the place where it happened. I think that ted called it the feeedback loop, or some thing similar and as a result of the slow feedback loop of traditional media like the newpapers and news teams its seems that methods such as twitter and other social media platforms are dominating the breaking news scene. This is going to be quite a issue i think in the future because traditional journos went to uni for a number of years to get their degrees and as a result know about journalism ethics, where as the average citizen journalist punter just goes ahead. I can see room for problems arizing.
i agree with duncan, i'd be pretty guttered coming out of a journalism degree to find that citizen journalism is moving towards such networks that only allow 140-character posts.
Although, i do find the beauty of a 140 character post to be succinct and straight to the point. It decreases the clutter, which is a major benefit if you ask me
Hey Annie,
Yeah, I agree that Twitter is indeed very useful, especially to keep the flow of information going. When I first joined Twitter, I assume it was similar with Facebook, but then I was LOST in Twitter, have no idea how to even search for a friend. Eventhough now I am still not a 100% sure how everything works, but at least I know the main purpose of Twitter, and how efficient it is when it comes to spreading news/ gossips. It certainly does speed up the flow of information, because it doesn't need to go through the mess of getting 'approval' for publications.
I agree with you Matt, The 140 character post does decrease a lot of the meaningless clutter which has turned me off Twitter in the first place, however the lack of quality control (although democratic!) means that there is still a lot of information to wade through before you find interesting facts and stories. This is one of the reasons that I think that qualified journalists do not have to worry about their job. Consumers do not have the time or energy to be sorting through this clutter to find a story. They like to be able to look up a story from a qualified news source, and then follow up by researching posts from citizens.
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