It could be a conversation. It wasn’t about reporting; it was about connecting.
And maybe it's not just about reporting and connecting, but reporting and connecting through something specific, some artifact of the online world: annotation.
There's already a segment of the Twitterati doing this via highlighted screenshots of text attached to Tweets as photos ("screenshorts" they are called).
There's even an app to do this now: OneShot.
and, of course, Justin Bieber.
And then we got to share in the pathos of his 18th birthday (best read in reverse):
Illustration by Paul Sahre
Really love the illustrations for this article. But shouldn't the knife be in the bird's back?
a steady stream of conversation percolating online.
While Twitter has certainly become just this, it strikes me at how bad Twitter actually is at "conversation." It's actually quite difficult to sustain a focused back and forth on Twitter. IMO.
the social media narrative recalled Cold War ideas that capitalist technology would triumph over communist inefficiency, as if people in the Middle East couldn’t have rebelled on their own without the gifts of American entrepreneurs. In the end, whatever was tweeted, there was no Twitter revolution in Iran.
Would like to know more about the Cold War ideas referenced above.
An experiment with @medium and @hypothes_is, https://medium.com/@judell/an-experiment-with-medium-78b670d0f0f8 …, illustrates the idea of portable comments.
Lets talk about annotating twitter tweets. If this is my note and I leave a comment where does it link to and where does it look to go
Twitter 101:
Twitter basics.
When we get to the point where someone sees the mere existence of a political conflict that requires us to criticize allies as a no-win scenario, something has gone very wrong. For the actual work of politics– convincing people to come over to our side in order to make the world a more just and equitable place– those politics have utterly failed. We have been talking about privilege theory for 30 years. We’ve been talking about intersectionality for 25 years. We’ve been getting into cyclical, vicious Twitter frenzies for a half decade. This is not working. And I doubt hardly anyone actually believes that this is working. They’re just having too much fun to stop.
I've recently decided, for myself, that Twitter is not a viable platform for political discussions. I simply can't do it anymore. I spend more time getting derailed by confusion stemming from trying to be terse when discussing subtleties than I do actually discussing the issues I wanted to discuss.