Entries Tagged 'Twitter' ↓

Recorded at the U.S. State Department, Clay Shirky talks in this TED Talk about how technology becomes phenomenal, or its uses become broader and more important (or more socially interesting), once that particular technology becomes technically boring and “everybody takes them for granted.” He used the example of the monitoring of elections via SMS in Nigeria in 2007, followed by the 2008 U.S. election and how we monitored our votes using cameras and phones. In other words, a first world country followed the example of a third world country not because the technology was new or revolutionary, but because the technology had become so common that it was part of the social landscape and therefore seen purely as a tool for everyday use.

Shirky goes on to explain how the media landscape has changed forever. Some of this is new, most of it isn’t, but Shirky’s analysis and explanation of the current and future state of media is well worth the time to watch. In particular, how we create environments for discussion and shape that conversation, has become the ONLY effective way of delivering a message and defining that message as “news” or anything else is getting harder and harder to do. I think one of the most important changes that has occurred is that today, we learn more from the discussion of the news than we do from the initial delivery of that news. ‘Twitter, Facebook, and cellphones can now make history.’

The following is a guest post from a veteran journalist, who also happens to be a reader of this blog:

OK – have we all gotten over the homely Scottish woman who can sing well? How about the brouhaha over Miss California and Donald Trump and whatever it was that she said that riveted a spellbound nation?

Good. I figured as much. These media creations flamed out about as quickly as they flamed on here in ADD Nation.

Now can we move onto something really important — such as what’s going to supplant Twitter as the NBT (that’s Next Best Thing, for all you folks who actually like to see words spelled out to maximize clarity and avoid confusion. And that was Attention Deficit Disorder Nation in the previous paragraph, as if you didn’t know.).

I mean, c’mon, Twitter is so half-hour ago, for crying out loud. For one thing, the name is just too long. For another, how the hell are users expected to use all 140 characters per Tweet? Do the Twitter-meisters think we’re a nation of Faulkners, Mailers and Joyces?

You can expect to see the NBT coming to a cell phone or other wireless driver- and pedestrian-distracting electronic device faster than you can say Susan Boyle. And I already have a name for it: Blip.

That’s right, Blip. It’s faster than Twitter. For example, it has only one syllable, which is an important consideration in ADDN. Each dispatch is called a Bleep, with the sender – or Bleeper – Bleeping, which gives the technology an edgier feeling than Tweet, Tweeter or Tweeting, which, face it, sound so ornithologically cartoonish (you know, “I taught I taw …”). And, Blip has only 70 characters, to maximize speed and minimize meaning, which seems to be the whole point of modern telecommunications.

But hold on. Blip isn’t even out yet, but it’s already so … last paragraph. Which brings us to the NBT faster than you can say SB. It’s It, which has that great “information technology” connotation, plus it’s It, too. Get It? With a name half as long as Blip, it (or is that It?) has only 35 characters, and its (or is that It’s?) dispatches are called, simply and appropriately, I. After all, that’s where all this fabulous technology is apparently leading: sating our nonstop, 24/7 compulsion to tell the world about, as George Harrison put it so succinctly 40(!) years ago, “I, Me, Mine.”

BTW, 35 characters are enough to sa