We can all stand witness to the ways in which social and news media can spread a movement within and across nations.  I know an Egyptian who claimed that her family and friends knew that the revolution was going to occur in the weeks and days before it actually happened.  How?  Just by the messages on social media and between individuals.  In a similar fashion, social media proposed and flamed the fires of the occupy wall street movement in the weeks before it emerged, grew, and took hold as a real story in mainstream media outlets.

The protest was set to start on the 17th.  At first, there was a kind of silence.  People questioned whether it was happening at all.

Interestingly, Al Jazeera was one of the media outlets which first recognized the plan for a protest.  Other small news organizations online followed the story from September 17th on.  The New York Times City Room blog picked up the story on September 19th, while nothing was put into print until September 25th, when a version of a September 23rd online article titled “Protesters Are Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim“  and beginning with the sentence “By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka,” was published.

Since then the General Assembly of the occupation has released a declaration and the movement has its own subreddit.  However, the lack of specific demands, particularly from the outset, has been seen as a weakness and has led some people to propose their own.

Clearly, social media has played a key role in this movement.  Yet, ultimately, social media doesn’t stray very far from a standard news cycle.  Here are Google searches and news stories for occupy wall street:

(courtesy of Google Trends)

And here are the tweets containing occupywallstreet:

(taken from Trendistic)

The tweets, Google searches, and news reference frequency all have peaks on the first day of the protest, on Sept. 25 when images of pepper spray being used by the NYPD spread and a high number of arrests occured, and on Oct. 1 when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Eventually, though, whether the movement has succeeded or not, it will fall out of the news cycle and off of people’s radar.  Even though as I type this Egyptians are protesting military rule in Tahrir Square, not many Americans do searches related to Egypt these days:

It’s unfortunate, but it appears that social media news runs alongside the news cycle.  Facebook posts can catch our attention, but only for so long, and what seems to be fueling tweets about the protest are acts of violence rather than its actual rationale.  Also, isn’t there a risk that we are beginning to confuse posting items on Facebook with really exercising our civic duty?  Last week five or more of my friends posted about the execution of Troy Davis, but how many actually took action in contacting local representatives or representatives in Georgia?

In fact, a Yale student recently claimed to have proven that, based on what occurred in Egypt, a “sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention.”  A journalist quickly used the study to point out how mass media, even as it spreads consciousness, can create a passive public.

Paradox Number Two:  Social media brings networks of people with like interests together, but in doing so it can create information bubbles.

In May of this year Eli Pariser presented a TED Talk in which he warned about how Google, Facebook, and other online companies use algorithms that customize what information is presented to people based on their individual tastes:

Thus, just by virtue of being ourselves, our internet is filtered.  We go further to filter our own experience when we read websites that cater to our cultural background or to our political interests.  Despite a study which seems to indicate that this personal filtering is not an issue, Bill Davidow and Ethan Zuckerman have argued that online media can give too much attention to extreme groups and views, and that “positive feedback” loops might push us to take more extreme views ourselves.  Eric E. Schmidt, the chief of Google, takes a middle ground view on the issue, acknowledging that for those who don’t know how to curate their own information, the internet can be a breeding ground of ignorance.

In the classroom, discussing and giving assignments that reflect on how media is curated, either invisibly or explicitly, in different contexts (on Wikipedia, in academic journals, on Facebook, in Google Scholar) can give students a wake-up call regarding how they navigate the web (and increasingly, how the web navigates them).

“The King’s Speech” is getting dismissed a bit by observers as ‘just’ a historical drama, a costume piece, and a buddy movie (the king and his speech therapist). It does, however, offer some interesting implicit speculation on what kind of king Edward VIII, friendly to Germany, might have been had he not abdicated. “The Social Network” presents a slice of history as well, albeit an incredibly recent one. The fact that the historical moment “The Social Network” explores is so recent certainly highlights the remarkably fast evolution and impact of social networking technologies. Is it because evolution in communications is so rapid, intense, and ongoing, that “The Social Network” manages to pull out the drama of a recent moment as clearly as if it were a costume piece and we’d had decades to process it? Or maybe it’s just the great job that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did with the screenplay, which also won an Oscar.

“The King’s Speech” deals with politics, and “The Social Network” with academia and the business world, but both of them are ultimately about relationships, the human element that should not get lost in the shuffle when we think about information and communication technologies. With Twitter and Facebook in the news daily as part of the political upheavals occurring in the Middle East, it’s worthwhile to remember that communication is about people, even when technology is their conduit. Twitter isn’t toppling oppressive regimes; it is people who are already energized for change, using it as one tool to communicate, who are effecting that change.  “The King’s Speech” isn’t about radio, it’s about a lonely king as Eliza Doolittle and his pal the speech therapist as Henry Higgins. And “The Social Network” isn’t just about the origins of the social networking tool Facebook. To me, it says much more about social class and exclusion; it could be an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel, for the pitfalls of social climbing and hubris it explores so poignantly.

Both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” are really good movies, both about relationships and communications, and extremely well-done.  “The King’s Speech” was heavily favored, but “The Social Network” was my pick, and not just because of its relevance, nor the fact that social media are observably impacting our lives every day. It’s just a compelling narrative, and I loved the ending, which imagines Zuckerberg sitting at his computer hitting Refresh every few seconds, hoping that the girl who rejected him will ‘friend’ him now on Facebook.

You know what’s cool?  [Hint:  it's not a billion dollars.]  What’s cool is a timeless story about human frailty, and about the imperative we all feel, as social beings, to communicate and connect with others.  Both movies offer that in spades.

photo credit: freeparking

I was doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives a few months ago when I came across a set of “communications files” for General William Westmoreland, a central military planner during the Vietnam War and later Army Chief of Staff.  The files contained all kinds of communications, mostly letters, spanning Westmoreland’s tenure as administrative head of the Army during the final years of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately for my dissertation, I didn’t find anything in the file that directly helped my project.  However, one folder in particular caught my attention more for its form than its content. A collection of papers marked “Wire Transcripts, 1968-72″ contained all of Westmoreland’s communications via wire service, or telegram, and when I opened the folder I was immediately struck by the uncanny sense that I was looking at a Twitter feed.  The pithy, often awkwardly abbreviated transmissions closely resembled the loose, stream-of-consciousness format that Tweets, status updates, and text messages have made ubiquitous.  As I browsed through Westmoreland’s proto-tweets, the effect was like reading an internal history of the Vietnam War broken down to its linguistic essence, and I realized that the impulse to communicate in incredibly short textual bursts was not unique to the Internet Age.

As I approach teaching a history course on Vietnam this summer, I wonder if the tweet-format can have uses in the classroom. Since so many writing exercises attempt to teach students how to organize their thoughts into one powerful central thesis (often in the form of a a single sentence), the informal language of text messaging might provide a natural springboard to develop that process.  A good example of how loads of meaning can be packed into 140 characters is found in these “Twitter Discographies,” which break down entire musical careers into nearly mathematical, often brilliant, aesthetic summaries.  A personal favorite, Neil Young, looks like this:

Neil Young: 1 shak(e)y; 2+3 yin/yang of entire career; 4 the hit; 5-7, 14 fucked-up genius; 8-13,20-33 yin/yang variations; 15-19 the ditch.

While most students already have a great deal of practice composing text messages, how might they benefit from exploring this format in an academic setting?  Are there ways to engage the same critical faculties involved in writing a five-paragraph essay in, let’s say, an exercise that asks students to reduce the Tet Offensive to a series of tweets?

photo credit: jessamyn

I’m curious what people think about the Library of Congress’s decision to digitally archive every public tweet.

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

To be honest, I don’t have a Twitter account, I don’t “follow” anyone, and I don’t really “get” the whole tweeting thing.  Obviously, I don’t know enough to have an opinion on this, but I couldn’t help but laugh at this comment made by “Uncle Fred” on a post at the Atlantic about the Twitter archive:

Great, now even future historians can muse over my failed toasted tomato sandwiches.

My questions are for those of you who are, or ever have been, on Twitter: Do you think tweets are something worth archiving? Are there privacy concerns? Will knowledge that your tweets will be archived change the nature of what you write? Any other thoughts or concerns?

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, and everywhere we go. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasiveness of the electronic world, I must admit that it can effectively create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

Unlike a Twitterer bending to duck a 140-character limit, the journal author/editor can go only so far with creative solutions since the text must adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.  Although the dictionary is growing it doesn’t allow for the creative abbreviations being pioneered by twitterati.  It usually means following Strunk and White’s advice: “Omit useless words.”  Not surprisingly, the intense editing done under the character-limit gun tends to yield excellent results.

As we help our students discover the value that comes along with the frustrations of editing, I think that space constraints can play a valuable role.  When a student shortens a text or tweet, they are employing some of the same skills necessary for communication efficiency in other contexts.

New technologies are not the first to put a price tag on characters.  An Op-Ed in the New York Times over the summer pointed to some humorous abbreviations invented by penny-pinching telegraph senders facing 15-character and 10-word limits.  I am intrigued by the expressions that the editors of the “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code” (1891) deemed worthy of inclusion.  Some of them are not phrases I see often these days (“can you recommend to me a good female cook,” abbreviated “CRISP”); others are (“taxation is oppressive”, “ORGANISM” for short).

Here is an excerpt, including some other abbreviations you may choose to use in your next tweet:

ABANDONEE Abandoned in a sinking condition
ABETTING Everything depends on the ability with which it is (they are) handled.
ABUSAGE His (their) absence is rather mysterious.
ACESCET Has met with a trifling accident.

I see that this post is already at 2775 characters, so I best stop here.

Following the conversation via Twitter. Photo by Alan Levine.

If you attended the Symposium on May 1, you no doubt saw that Twitter played a major part in the event: as a topic of conversation (as in Gardner Campbell’s session), as a means of broadcasting what was happening over the course of the day, and as a way to connect with others out there in in the Interwebs interested in what we were talking about.

Our friends in media services wheeled over a beautiful 46″ flat panel display, which we used with Twitter Camp to display all tweets tagged #blsci as they came in. By the end of the evening portion of the event, there were almost 300 tweets on the Symposium from attendees as well as a few other folks chiming in or sharing our tweets with their networks. (See Boone Gorges’ great post on the use of Twitter as a backchannel at the Symposium for more on the impact of microblogging on the day’s conversations.)

Naturally, we wanted a record of all this and started looking into ways in which to pull all #blsci tweets and save them for posterity. Unfortunately, there was no one good option. The native Twitter search was ok, but only returned a few tweets at a time. Twazzup was very nice but only returned about 100 tweets. Hashtags.org returned even fewer results grouped according to no clear logic at all. (These sites are fine for following tweets live, but not so much for archiving old ones.) A Twitter contact in Texas suggested a Python script (scary) that didn’t quite work right either.

Then, our good friends Lucas Thurston and Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding, the genius code-poet developers of our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VOCAT), came up with a solution: a simple PHP script they called Tweetripper that dumped all the tweets we needed to a text file. When we ran it, Tweetripper, which came with simple but thorough instructions, gave us something that looks like this (these are just a few of the day’s tweets in reverse chronological order):


#blsci Elbow suggests we should learn the skill of ignoring audiences during speaking/writing. Says @jeffjarvis closed eyes during talk.
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:56:08 +0000

Elbow: first audience when writing must be yourself. #blsci
lwaltzer
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:50:59 +0000

A Twitterati gallery has emerged at the rear of the audience at #blsci. This might be related to the need for outlets.
boonebgorges
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:05 +0000

Afternoon speaker, Peter Elbow, is taking the stage. Author of "Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process."; #blsci
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:01 +0000

Wish I was at #blsci!
katemo
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:36:52 +0000

Fantastically stimulating conversation at Baruch Communication Symposium #blsci. Boring academics? Nay. They are the Twittelligentsia!
alberrios
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:10:04 +0000


Perfect. Just what we were looking for: a way of creating a record of all the furious tweeting from a remarkably stimulating and memorable event.

Zach and Lucas wrote this script absolutely pro bono, in the interest of others out there like us interested in a way to archive tweets. They created something the community wanted and shared it, enabling others to tweak it and adapt it and develop it further. That is the spirit of open-source right there. So, in that spirit, here is the Tweetripper script for those not afraid of a command line interface. Use it well. If you modify it, let us know.