Why You Should Be on Twitter

By Chuck Tryon, AlterNet. Posted March 4, 2009.

This sense of community and conversation has manifested itself at a number of recent academic conversations as well. At the notoriously overwhelming Modern Language Conference in San Francisco last December, many academics who found each other on Twitter were able to organize impromptu dinner outings and discuss ongoing conference themes using Twitter, many of us posting comments from our cell phones, BlackBerrys and iPhones. Many of these ideas were neatly summarized in a blog post by Cathy Davidson and have provided material for our ongoing scholarly conversations that seek to make sense of how we communicate and how digital technologies may be involved in that.

Finally, Zaitchik worries that Twitter will somehow not only supplement but "supplant journalism," echoing an argument made by fellow AlterNet writer, Rory O'Conner. This argument, in my reading, reduces "journalism" from the activity of gathering facts and checking sources to whatever final product appears on the page, whether on the Web or printed.

Yes, the first photo of the Hudson River airplane landing may have been posted to TwitPic, but that's not so much a "scoop" as it is an initial gathering of facts: something is happening here, and we need to document it. The articles and reports and interpretations all came later in every newspaper and on every TV station in the country.

And guess what? Most of those reports were more than 140 characters. If we want the strongest possible journalistic practices, there is no reason not to tap into the collective intelligence of other people who are witnessing an event, watching a debate, or whatever. Then a good journalist reconciles those interpretations into a longer story, one that hopefully approximates what actually happened.

I'm responding to Zaitchik's article at such length because it seems to fall into some of the worst habits of technological determinism. Twitter is blamed for any number of problems, whether shorter attention spans, bad grammar or poor critical-thinking skills. It also assumes that Twitter can only work as it was designed, a miniature, public status update (implied in Twitter's guiding question: "What are you doing?").

Instead, users have developed any number of new uses for it, some that were clearly not predicted by its creators (hence the need for updates to Twitter that conform to user practices). In other words, Twitter users are not constrained by the limits of the 140-character box, but are largely responsible for creating the genres and styles that have emerged on the site.

While I use Twitter quite a bit -- according to my Twitter stats, I tweet approximately five times a day -- I don't intend to champion everything about it. I've known many people who tried Twitter and found that it failed to supplement their communication with others in any meaningful way.

Sometimes I can get distracted by constantly updating "friend feeds," and 140 characters can lead to misunderstandings, but rather than engaging in forms of unneeded media panic, we need more thoughtful, more flexible accounts of how media work.

Editor's Note: Check out AlterNet on Twitter.

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Chuck Tryon is an assistant professor of English at Fayetteville State University and is the author of the forthcoming book Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Digital Convergence (Rutgers University Press). He also blogs at the Chutry Experiment, and he invites readers to follow him on Twitter.

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