The six stages of media twitter coverage hell

April 1, 2009 · Posted in Media Criticism · Comments 
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Mike Elgan makes a funny. The Six Stages of Media Twitter Coverage Hell.

He misses a stage:

7. Twitterati make fun of coverage to gain traffic.

To quote Mr. Elgan:

The so-called backlash is just the media’s knee-jerk pseudo-contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably, attacking Twitter itself.

My advice: Don’t take any of it too seriously. The media does this with every truly major Internet phenomenon that comes along. It happened with the Internet itself, then e-mail, then the Web, then the tech bubble, then social networking and now Twitter.

heh.

Honestly, I don’t care who’s covering Twitter. It’s the same as Facebook, MySpace, blogging, IM, etc. Play the same record so many times and it gets old. Just enjoy the ride, because it’ll come around again.

Do what you want. Use it. Don’t use it. Talk about it, write the lifestyles feature. Whatever. I’ll keep plugging away.

Am I getting too cynical in my old age?

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Social Media and history: another frame to consider

March 29, 2009 · Posted in Media Criticism · Comments 
Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

It seems a common trait when “new” means of communication arise for there to be a bit of the “tsk tsk” from folks who don’t seem to “get it.” It can happen with a medium, or with a message (think rock ‘n’ roll and blogging).

Lately, it’s happening with Twitter, in particular, and “social media” in general.

The latest examples to fall into this vein of luddism are from Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail, Jenny McCarthy of the Telegraph UK, and Robert G. Picard of The Media Business.

I encourage you to read those three pieces and the points made in them. Then come back.

Now, I’m not going to get into how many times I’ve heard these points raised about every different new platform for expression that comes along (recalling the professor who described blogging as “the mental equivalent of masturbation”). And I’m not going to debate whether telling everyone about your “banal” existence actually achieves any worthwhile ends. There are certainly problems with social media.

But I do want to say that all this “narcissism” is a good thing from a historical perspective.

Bear with me for a little biographical backstory: While attending South Carolina for my Ph.D. courses, I was able to take a course in journalism history that was very informative, and led to a conference paper that I was actually quite pleased with. (see the Academic Resources section of this site for a PDF version).

But one thing I learned from journalism history is that there are an awful lot of “holes” in the historical record. Source documents are remarkably limited. Secondary sources like news reports are remarkably limited. What brought this home to me was listening to Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina talk about protests where he was arrested and not a single word appeared in the local newspaper.

Then there are lives that are lived outside the glare of cameras and media attention. Ordinary people who exist as unemployment statistics, or productivity statistics. If you were to do research on these people, you’d likely find some gov’t documents, maybe, as McCartney noted, “a few photographs,” but precious little else.

The beauty of social media from a historical perspective is that there is a greater chance that the lives of individual real people can be saved for the historical record. A fuller picture of the people who surround us will be available for future historians, for future generations. That doesn’t mean it will all have equal value. But it could be available. I wish more of my great-grandfather’s life was available for me to know about, to learn from.

One thing social media allows that past media platforms don’t is the ability to put more of “yourself” into the medium. TV doesn’t allow that. How many historical nuggets did we lose to people watching “Must See TV” instead of living their lives?

Of people listening to crap top-40 radio instead of creating their own music?

Now let’s turn that around: What if you had access to your great-great-grandparents’ Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Flickr photos, and YouTube mashups? Not to mention their iTunes playlists? Could you get a better idea of who they were than looking at a few faded posed pictures, maybe an old diary, and some government records?

That can’t be a bad thing.

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