Twitter? Twipe? Or Am I not Getting it?
Harry McGee
This is a little off-subject. I joined Twitter recently. I wanted to explore its possibilities for political commentary.
The site has been hyped unmercilessly. And the whole idea of a mini blog did sound appealing. And had not Barack Obama and British actor Stephen Fry taken the medium to new heights?
This morning’s report by Elanor Burnhill on Morning Ireland confirmed why it doesn’t really do it for me. The 140 character message is very good for telling people what individuals are doing right now (Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift, or is in a plane heading towards Japan) but pointless when it comes to imparting what’s what in politics.
In the IT, we tend not to personalise our blogs, ie restrain ourselves from focusing on the subjects we know and love best. Posts saying ‘on way to Tullamore to do doorstep interview with Cowen’ just don’t do it for me. The information is so mundane as to render it useless. It takes time out of a very busy working day. And it just seems, so pointless.
Granted, there are times of high drama and unfolding events when conceivably they may be of some us. But giving updated accounts of politics can sometimes be like describing the daily activities of a tortoise.
So, sorry, I just don’t get it. It is another alternative to social networking, people giving breaking news about their lives or making small-scale observations about small-scale things.
Perhaps I haven’t explored it enough. But the quality of information (as opposed to quantity) on Twitter and on social networking sites like Facebook isn’t high. They are all about personalising, ie me-oriented. Even brand Barack is presented like that on Facebook. Check out the Facebook site for Barry’s Tea (which somebody told me last week has over 2,000 ‘friends’). It can only work on Facebook if it is presented as a human being and people address it as such. And even then it’s boring. There is an addictive quality to Facebook. But like gaming machines you quickly learn the futility of it. You can’t stop yourself from logging in and then you discover that the only update is that somebody you don’t really know has offered you a virtual beer (and you don’t even drink, virtually or in real life!)
And it’s not that Deaglan and I are self-effacing (our egos are so big that it’s sometimes hard to squeeze into the office we share). But Twitter doesn’t pass the our quality tweshold. Am I wrong?
Can Twitter work for politics?
10:21 am
Perhaps it might not work for political journalists (though I think for freelancers who don’t have the security of a newsroom, it can be a very good way of getting hold of news very quickly), but for the actual politicians themselves it should frankly be mandatory.
Unfortunately in Ireland we don’t have a great culture of having our TDs and Councillors blogging (while most might have their names on one, they don’t really write blog entries, so much as recycle press releases), and only one TD (Ciaran Cuffe) is on Twitter. If Twitter does begin to take off more amongst the rank and file of Ireland, it couldn’t be more imperative for our elected reps to jump on the same bandwagon and help to bridge the gulf between themselves and their constituents.
John Culberson is the best example – he’s a Congressman (R-TX) who keeps a very active Twitter account at http://twitter.com/johnculberson. And while it might occasionally only keep tokenistic entries, at least letting people know what they’re doing is a start. I’m from Meath West and I’d love if Mary Wallace or Noel Dempsey would Tweet and tell me that they’re on their way to a Cabinet meeting where they’re “going to try and tackle the Financial Regulator problems headon”, for example.
But anyway, to your main point – I do think that with establisment in the field of journalism renders some things like Twitter fairly redundant. People who have been in political journalism for ten or twenty years will have enough contacts to know a story before it hits the newsstands. For the regular joe soaps like the rest of us – or for people trying to break in but not having an endless resource of newswires – Twitter represents a promising and adaptable new way of finding things out very quickly.
I’ll finish with this example – if you go to the official Twitter Search page (http://search.twitter.com/), you’ll see the ten most-Tweeted topics right now. The top one is #blackout – and if you click it you can discover about a citizens’ initiative in New Zealand against potential changes in copyright law. Is that the sort of thing we might have heard of? No. But is it the sort of thing that might trigger similar moves worldwide that could ultimately prove to be a big deal? Very possibly.
Comment by Gav Reilly