HOW RELEVANT IS TWITTER?

Over the past six months, as Twitter has evolved from obscure internet phenomenon to overhyped global trend, it has polarised opinion, inspired contempt and, most worryingly, been cast as a possible remedy to the decline of print journalism.

As a medium for news, Twitter does have its benefits: it outpaces newspapers, culls information directly from its source and can aggregate content quickly, creating archives and highlighting trends within a remarkably short span of time. But to overemphasise these qualities is to miss the point. With speed and succinctness its most newsworthy features, Twitter represents a twist on a classic journalistic dictum: this minute’s news is the next minute’s forgotten URL.

When taken as a crowd phenomenon, however, Twitter becomes more relevant. Unlike Facebook or Myspace, which are organised around carefully groomed individual online personas, Twitter is group-based. Uers can create personal salons in which private conversations are pooled into a single news stream. This is a good way to disrupt the myopia of one’s own internet habits, and also it’s probably the only way 460,000 people would ever be privy to the personal musings of John McCain (or Slavoj Zizek, for that matter). If you’re selective about who you follow, trends often emerge, and checking a feed begins to resemble eavesdropping at an unusually entertaining party.

Writing in Slate Farhad Manjoo, a tech columnist, observed that Twitter is “not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.” He’s right. Unlike Facebook, which has become a 21^st-century necessity, Twitter is less about defining identity than it is about managing the creation of communities and the flow of information. Like the production of news, the ability to decide what is newsworthy is fast becoming a bottom-up process, meaning that users can influence content by shaping trends. Instead of readers following headlines, it’s now journalists who find themselves chasing online memes in search of a story. Additionally, with the proliferation of sites like TweetBrain, Twitter is now an indispensable means of crowdsourcing–a mode of engaging the public to respond to specific questions or tasks, such as designing a health-care policy or writing a Wikipedia entry.

In general, Twitter’s genius is less in its content than in its organisation. While it’s occasionally good for breaking stories, such as with January's plane crash in the Hudson, it’s primarily a rhizomatic database, an archive in which users transcend profession or geography. Through organising itself around keywords, Twitter pushes internet journalism to its extreme, collapsing distinctions between reader and writer, specialist and novice. It makes it equally easy to access either niche communities or an undifferentiated public.

As new information technologies redefine expectations and communities, journalism must evolve to balance the wisdom of the individual with the input of the crowd.

~ JESSICA LOUDIS

Picture credit: Kathy Sierra

Article tools

Comments

Twitter is like a breath of

April 29, 2009 - 03:51 — Khurram (not verified)

Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.

http://Spryka.com

Five Stages of Twitter Relevance

May 16, 2009 - 19:21 — Jim MacLennan (not verified)

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece on this idea of Twitter's relevance - especially for use in a business.

http://bit.ly/9QV5Z

It helps to draw parallels to previous experiences - like socializing at a cocktail party!

Image Credit

May 16, 2009 - 21:56 — Victor (not verified)

Hi! nice article - the images seems to be accredited incorrectly, tough :)

http://twitter.com/KathySierra/status/1822560454

Mistaken picture credit

May 16, 2009 - 22:03 — Grant Neufeld (not verified)

The graphic in this article was actually created by Kathy Sierra:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/httpwww37s...

Uncredited Use of Kathy Sierra's Work

May 16, 2009 - 22:17 — A Concerned Citizen (not verified)

The uncredited graph you used in this post is by best selling author and speaker Kathy Sierra. If you want journalism to stay relevant, perhaps you should practice responsible journalism and credit the work of others.

Fo those familiar with Kathy Sierra's work, it will be immediately obvious that this chart is hers as it's in her characteristic style popularized on her blog Creating Passionate User's as well as her in her bestselling Head First technology book series.

She's already heard about this and is posting on Twitter about it - which is how I heard about it.

May I suggest an apology?

Love,

Matt

Misappropriated content

May 17, 2009 - 01:09 — MaggieL (not verified)

Not only swiped, but from as long ago as 2006.

Obviously Kathy's work. I'm a fan of hers as well.

Let's replace it here with a graph showing not the shortening interval between interruptions, but the shrinking time between the time of publishing something that isn't yours and the time everybody knows about it.

Ignorance rather malice

May 17, 2009 - 02:04 — Visitor (not verified)

I'm sure the image credit error was due ignorance and not malice and if that is the case, it just shows that this person is not qualified to write about technology. If you look at the picture on Flickr you can see that it was tagged 'Kathy Sierra'. The writer doesn't seem to know that a picture/image creator is not necessarily the user that posted it on Flickr.

Kathy Sierra

May 17, 2009 - 11:03 — Emily Bobrow

Dear readers,

Many thanks for calling us out on our error in denying Kathy Sierra proper credit for her excellent chart. We have fixed this mistake and promptly sent Ms Sierra an apology. Obviously this was not a case of malice. But if someone would care to craft a chart that illustrates the relationship between a published error and a humbled self-correction, under the impressive policing of readers, I would encourage it.

Please keep reading. It keeps us honest.

Very best,
Emily

Editor, moreintelligentlife.com

Why I (now) love Twitter

May 17, 2009 - 14:28 — Kathy Sierra (not verified)

I originally made that Twitter Curve for a post that wasn't... *Twitter-positive.* Yet purely as a result of Twitter, people I know and don't know took the time to make a correction here in comments.

Posting with missing or incorrect attribution is getting easier and easier, and I've done it many times for many (often stupid) reasons. What matters is whether/how attribution errors are corrected, and I couldn't be more delighted with Emily's response.

Cheers and thanks to all.

Useful Twitter-based site that relies on human judgement

May 18, 2009 - 10:51 — Visitor (not verified)

I agree with what you say. I've found http://breakingtweets.com is a clever application, and probably one of the models for news of the future. Humans follow "beats" on twitter, and then organize and put the tweets in context around stories. For one thing, they cull the tweets and if an event has a geographic locale, they find tweets from there to go with the whatever MSM news is being tweeted. Check it out.

Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas