Is Twitter Writing or Speech?

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By Megan Garber on Nieman Journalism Lab, June 2 - New tools are at their most powerful, Clay Shirky says, once they’re ubiquitous enough to become invisible. Twitter may be increasingly pervasive — a Pew study released yesterday shows that 13 percent of online adults use the service, which is up from 8 percent six months ago — but it’s pretty much the opposite of invisible. We talk to each other on Twitter, yes, but almost as much, it seems, we talk to each other about it.

Often, we yell. The big debates about Twitter’s overall efficacy as a medium — like the one launched by, say, Bill Keller, whose resignation from The New York Times’ editorship some Twitterers have attributed (jokingly? I think?) to his Twitter-take-on columns — tend to conclude without much consensus. A recent (and comparatively calm) debate between Mathew Ingram and Jeff Jarvis ended like so: “I guess we will have to agree to disagree.” Read the full article

Comments

  1. Jon Barron says:

    Great question but it has to be writing (a bit like a Haiku). Like all good press release writing and distribution, Tweets need to be concise and to the point and sum everything up in just a few brief words, just like the opening paragraph of a press release in fact.

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