On the True Importance of Twitter

While not quite the technological revolution that many predicted it would be (yet), the Twitter event is clearly more than ephemeral - hell, even retrograde luddites like me are on it. I realize that Twitter has been an increasingly useful mechanism for relating news, ranging from reports in Iran during protests last year to people spreading the word on political stories via Twitter. That said, I'm pretty sure the best function of Twitter is posts like this:

So glad to be awake and out of my dream where I was in an arranged marriage with Frank Zappa, where my only joy was playing saxophone.

Critics have accused Twitter of being narcissistic, an overload of private information, and trivial. Perhaps it is, but when triviality can offer images as awesome as the one above, I'm all for it.

Twittering, free speech and sports

I apologize for defying blogging etiquette by not posting for a while, and then jumping in with a self plug, but I thought many of you might be interested in this issue because it touches on aspects of free speech, social media, and regulation as they relate to sports.

I am sure you are aware of last month's NFL incident with Chargers' cornerback Antonio Cromartie, where the team charged him a fine of $2,500 simply for castigating training-camp food on his Twitter page. In fact, coach Norv Turner specifically told Cromartie that he wasn't to say anything critical about the organization on Twitter.

Several other incidents with players saying so-called sensitive or offensive things on the microblog have happened recently. Notable ones were Vikings' Bernard Berrian's tweet, overblowing the consequences of quarterback Tarvaris Jackson's knew injury, and Houston Dynamo star Brian Ching's tweet about a cheating referee. Ching was charged $500 for this.

After several teams tried to disallow Twitter use by players altogether, the NFL finally decided to simply ban tweeting by players within 90 minutes of the start of an NFL game, and until after media interviews following the game. This seems like a more reasonable form of regulation since it involves merely restricting it on the field and during media interactions.

Other than the fact that this sort of content regulation infringes on free speech, however, there is also an opportunistic nature to these rules, considering NFL teams use Twitter to announce updates on events and policies (draft picks were revealed through Twitter, for instance, and ironically, the Chargers scooped their first-round draft pick on the microblogging service). This gives the impression that teams and the organization simply want to cover up anything that might be harmful to the reputation of the organization.

The US Open jumped on the Twitter-regulation bandwagon last week, when it sent an email to all players with a list of dos and don'ts about the kinds of messages that cannot be tweeted. Apparently, the Tennis Integrity Unit is concerned that players might reveal sensitive information that could be potentially used for match fixing and sports betting - information like player injuries, weather conditions, etc.

Again, the US Open itself uses Twitter to promote matches, polls, contests, and even US Open gear. But it has no qualms about regulating what players tweet about. Like NFL players, many tennis stars--most notably, Andy Roddick, the Williams sisters, and Britain's Andy Murray--have taken to tweeting extensively. Both Roddick and Murray were outraged and outspoken about it.

Now, here's my shameless self plug: I wrote about this topic in some detail at the Huffington Post yesterday: do check it out if you can.

Twitter, WAM, and covering the story

So I wrote about my WAM experience over at Bust, but the thing that I've really been thinking about since the weekend was the Twitter coverage.

Not everyone has the finances or the ability to go to conferences, but the Web allows for the experience to be shared more widely. In addition to video coverage that will apparently be available on the web soon, the running Twitter stream managed to pull people who could not attend the event into the conversation.

The conversation started with a basic hashtag: #wam09. Conference attendees tagged their Twitter updates with #wam09 and a Twitter search for the hashtag allowed attendees and anyone else to see all public updates with the hashtag. As soon as I started tweeting with the hashtag, I got new Twitter followers.

From there, though, the conversation multiplied. At the first panel I attended, on Gender Non-Conformity and the Media, Jack from Feministe wrote a panel-specific hashtag on the board: #wam09gnc. We used that tag for our tweets from this panel, and I had the main search page, which automatically updates, open while I was listening and tweeting comments from the panel I was in.

This might sound like it requires an intense attention span, but I'm used to running three programs at once on a normal day.

On top of that, other WAMmers would retweet comments from others at other panels, spreading the discussion out further.

I met people through Twitter during panels, reading their Twitter feeds and then stopping to introduce myself at the end of the panel, and added new people to follow while picking up new followers and joining discussions on varying topics. In the final panel I attended, Women and the Economic Crisis: Getting Beyond the Corporate Media Narrative, (#wam09ec) we seemed to have perfected the process, googling and instantly tweeting links to organizations, books, and other sites referenced during the discussion in real time.

Twitter is ideally suited to events like WAM, where a large number of people are covering a specific event with several different parts happening simultaneously. Information was spread through Twitter--one attendee was stranded and needed donations, and the request for cash spread quickly across the Net, getting her home. Livetweeting one single event--like the presidential press conference or the debates--is fun, but often many people comment on the same things. The inauguration tweets were more useful because directions, warnings, and other information could be exchanged in real time.

But for an event like WAM--or many other conferences--this technology is perfectly suited. I'm sort of thinking on screen here, but I wonder what other events/issues could be covered this way?

Twitter and the election

I've been digging into this book for one of my classes, and I think I'd recommend it to anyone concerned with the state of journalism (which I assume, since you're reading political blogs, that you are).

In any case, as I was winding up the 150 or so pages I had to finish today, I got to a mention of the "social production of journalism."

So far, McChesney hasn't mentioned Twitter, (the book is from this year) but I'm going to.

I've mentioned before, I think, that I've been sucked into live-Twittering the debates. I got addicted to reading live Twitter feeds during the DNC, when I was all over the place and rarely at home in front of a television. My first two experiences live-Twittering myself were at Karthika's, in front of her TV, with the computer open in front of us, giving us two levels of social production: the interpersonal, with the two of us discussing in real time, face to face, as the debates went on, and then of course the interaction with my Twitter-buddies (mostly bloggers, a few real life friends, and even some comics industry folk that I follow because of my other gigs covering comics for Newsarama and Bust).

Twitter runs a feed now specifically for the election, with hot political topics across the top of your home screen any time you go to the Twitter page. I've gotten some news from this--I wondered why the Flyers were a hot political topic on Saturday, so I clicked the link to find out that Sarah Palin got booed at a Flyers game. (Which begs the question, why did she think that Philly would be a good city to drop a puck at? Not only are we overwhelmingly Democrats here, but we boo at anything. Really.)

But more importantly, I get a lot of my news from my Twitter buddies. People will post a link along with a short synopsis of the story they're linking, and I can check it out. I found out about my bank's buyout through Twitter, found out that the bailout bill passed the House through Twitter, and many other things.

The people I choose to follow on Twitter are a self-selected group. Like I mentioned, it's mainly bloggers, a few real-life friends, and comics industry folk. They are to a person liberal, though some are to the right of me and some to the left (if that's possible). They are smarter than the average bear--I don't hang out with dumb folks. Yet not all of them are journalists or even journalism students. They are artists, fiction writers, editors, photographers, and students of diverse subjects. They are scattered across the country (and a few outside of it).

What they have in common is a tendency to use Twitter to communicate not only personal details, but larger issues. And with most of them, we communicate back and forth. We share blog posts that we've written and articles that others have written. We provide support for each other when we're having a bad day, and often a Twitter post will lead to me emailing or texting or even calling to see what's up with a friend.

But most importantly, as I've noted, the use of Twitter to socially construct media is the primary interest. Our discussions during live-Twittering the debates shape our views and contribute to what we write. It's a community not in the sense of geography, but in the sense of like minds coming together. Not all of the people that I follow know each other, but I'll retweet a point made by someone the others aren't following, and they'll retweet me. We pass information along, rippling outwards, and with the hash tags feature you can make sure your political posts are encompassed into the Twitter timeline.

I get new followers with each liveTwitter debate.

Last Thursday I started trying to fact-check the candidates in real time. It's hard for just one person to do, but imagine if we'd organized that sooner? If each of us were trying to fact-check one statement, to pull up documentation to prove it true or false, and tossed that into the mainstream?

I have plans to be in New York for a friend's art opening/debate watch party on Wednesday, but you can bet I'll have the Crackberry out and twittering.

I don't know if this is exactly what McChesney was meaning by social construction of journalism, but it comes close, in my mind. Because though it starts out in our little echo chamber, it spreads outward, gets pulled into the main stream of data, and with a little help...who knows?

Any of you on Twitter? Talk to me. Follow me. Join my experiment and help live-fact-check the debate. Or just listen to me rant occasionally about Vikings, back pain, family, and Sarah Palin.