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(yes, skippy coined the phrase!)
Senator Claire McCaskill (D) has gained a lot of notoriety about her use of Twitter:
(from Senator McCaskill’s staffer, Adrianne Marsh)
A story about Twitter that includes Claire will run at the tail end of ABC World News tonight.3:27 PM Feb 25th from web
And the senator?:
(from Senator McCaskill)
Those naysayers bout twitter don’t get it. It’s all about communication. Communication is always a good thing especially in my job.12:14 PM Mar 3rd from TinyTwitter
Communication is good. Anything that bucks the perceived hegemony of the corporate news industrial complex is good.
Communicating in only 140 characters doesn’t leave much room for detail or nuance when dealing with complex issues. That would explain television news.
David Waldman over at Congress Matters weighs in on political Twittermania:
…And that’s how we get back to the original point. What’s transformative about a medium that enables journalists to ask Senators why they voted the way they voted? Does it really make the question more hard-nosed because it was asked in a medium normally reserved for asking, “wut up?”
There’s nothing transformative there, of course. But because it’s done using a new technological tool, it’s regarded by people who have heretofore approached online communications with some suspicion as being something entirely different from their communications in the past. And the people who engage in its use are viewed as some new species of animal.
Maybe the best thing that can come out of this move to Twitter is the realization by the people who have been so suspicious of blogs and bloggers that they’re really not doing anything different than they were ever doing. They’re communicating just the same, but with new tools.
The worst thing that could come out of it, though, would be for them to fail to see that, and to continue to regard the use of Twitter as something entirely removed from normal communications. Cuz it got little buttons 2 push n stuff.
I blog, therefore I am.
…there can be drawbacks to being universally available to everyone:
Twitter does help out if you make a living with TinyURL.
I’m going to guess there is a link between Claire mentioning she reads every message, and an increase in messages.
that Claire is a natural born twitterer (or tweeter?) she just “gets it”.
I’m taking Tony Messenger off my twitter though. Last week he was taking up tweet space THANKING people for following him. I log into twitter and I have tweet after tweet after tweet from him. Right now there are 11. One of them is correcting a typo for gods’ sake. He just doesn’t “get” twitter. Nobody cares about him that much. His stuff isn’t anything you couldn’t read in the newspaper.
Claire now. She gets it. I bet she tweets the Mizzou game tonight.
It sounds like a lot of stuff people said about blogs when they first arrived on the scene (and still say.) I mean, you have people who aren’t journalists being able to interact with journalists and media figures (politicians, sports stars, musicians) who normally only interact with each other. True, some people only say “wut up” on Twitter. But some people have very little to say on blogs, or in newspaper op-ed pieces.