Just One More Reason to Love Twitter
I saw this in my stream this morning and thought it summarized well why Twitter is addicting. Check out Stowe Boyd trash talking the White House official Twitter account, which this morning is live tweeting the President's speech in Ghana.



Comments 13 Comments
LMAO
Anyway, thanks, Steve! This would serve as a great example for one of my MA papers due next week :-)
The White House, bless its heart, is experimenting. In this case, it's streaming text from speeches, which have a specific rhetorical structure, into a medium where that structure doesn't work. Delivered in a speech, this line was probably just fine. In Twitter, though, it doesn't work.
And this highlights an overall problem with media in general. Loss of context creates a disconnect when the same message is applied across different platforms. I discovered this when I piped my Twitter feed into Facebook. I began to get disjointed, often irritating comments on the Twitter updates in Facebook, because those reacting didn't have the full context for the conversation. In addition, the culture of Facebook is very different from Twitter. The two just didn't mix, so I disconnected the pipeline.
In the case of Obama and Twitter, there's probably a dialog to be had there, but electronic communications and archiving laws -- which make it difficult for the president to even use simple e-mail -- probably prevent Obama from using Twitter and other social media with same ease as the average citizen. But clearly, streaming the text of speeches into Twitter doesn't work, either.
Context, as they say, is everything.
@Steve: Thanks! (blush). You are ALWAYS relevant and a great guy too ;)