Blogs, bah, Tweets

An interesting phenomenon explored: Why have journalists, who spent so much time and energy bashing blogs, been so taken with Twitter?

I find the question especially interesting because Twitter seems to have all the bad aspects of blogging and none of its strengths. Smith offers two reasons why he tweets so much despite being paid to blog: Twitter is faster and it is now the dominant medium of online political “conversation”.

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Blogging was a direct attack on MSM hegemony at both the micro (fisking) and macro levels (explanation space). I just don't see Twitter as the same threat. It is a flood of unmermorable chatter that is easy to ignore. Blogging had the potential to break the power of the MSM guild. Bloggers, at their best, presented arguments. Arguments can both change minds on the immediate subject and undermine the credibilty of those establishment pundits who present weak cases on a regular basis.

This fascinates me because I'm an MSM member who has really taken to blogging but not so much the social media. I finally got myself a Facebook account, but I haven't done anything with it, and the requests to be friends are piling up. Twitter I have avoided altogether, and I plan to hold out as long as I can. If Twitter really is the "dominant medium of the online political conversation," heaven help the country. But since the emerging dominant format of TV politics seems to be the sound-bite "debate," I suppose the simple-minded Tweets are exceptionally suited for our political "conversation."

I think we're getting too hung up on the specific technology of the communications revolution. I've written several pieces for the editorial page over the years arguing that the faster modern life evolves, the more schools should concentrate on the basics. Nothing the kids learn today will still be valid for very long, so they will need more than ever to have a strong foundation of fundamentals that will help them quickly adapt, over and over, to all the new stuff coming at them. That's the advice I'd give aspiring journalists, too. You might as well get ready for a whole series of new formats -- the Internet, blogs and social media are just the very beginning -- that are going to come one after the other. Get ready to learn them each in turn and prepared to discard them for the next one as required; don't suppose the latest hot thing is going to be the last one. And in the meantime, concenrate on the basics: what you want to say and how you want to say it.

"Aspiring  journalists" means everybody, by the way, since all this new technology has brought us to what might be called the Second Penny Press Era. There will always be a need for people with that job title, even as recognizable ways of showcasing them disappear (including, alas, dead-tree editions of newspapers). In fact, as information continies to grow exponentially, there will be a greater need than ever for gatekeepers who can separate the wheat from the chaff.