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Message Is Loud And Clear
On Twitter, the message is the thing. The medium is not the message, contrary to Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan's theory more than a generation ago that the meaning of a message is shaped and controlled by the medium in which it is embedded. On television, for example, the news sometime ago about the sex scandal in Kashmir provoking chief minister Omar Abdullah's impulsive offer to resign would have given us a different feeling and perception about the troubled Valley's political problems than if the story had been read in a newspaper. Call it the filtering effect, which in Twitter is minimal.
Twitter is unique. If you can't compose your thoughts in 140 characters, the maximum length allowed in Twitter, try something else. Buy an ad page, write a blog or stand up on a soapbox and harangue the world. In Twitter, the message dominates the medium and thus can carry an awesome punch, the impact of a direct force. ''Marg bar dictator!'' they chanted and tweeted and YouTubed ("Death to the dictator") in Farsi and English in Tehran in recent post-election rallies protesting the reported rigging that re-elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian president.
We saw how last November mobile Mumbaikars tweeted in real time about the Pakistani terrorist attack that killed 163 people, an event that highlighted the unprecedented role of new social media in our daily lives. And, in fact, tweeting about the Mumbai attack has become an important case study on American campuses.
"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy," tweeted Janis Krums on January 15 with the photo of the US Airlines that had belly-landed on the Hudson River, not far from New York's LaGuardia airport where the plane was struck by a bird. Before news media crew could get to the scene, Americans were stunned watching the rescue of passengers tweet-picture by tweet-picture, ferry by ferry.
From cybercasting ethnic riots in China's Uighur and Iran's cheating mullahs to accidents, from airing personal grievances to promoting business and services, people are using Twitter in myriad ways. But if you tweet publicly, be careful. Someone might feel offended and file a defamation suit. That happened to a Chicago tenant Amanda Bonnen who tweeted, ''Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay.''
Twitter is unique. If you can't compose your thoughts in 140 characters, the maximum length allowed in Twitter, try something else. Buy an ad page, write a blog or stand up on a soapbox and harangue the world. In Twitter, the message dominates the medium and thus can carry an awesome punch, the impact of a direct force. ''Marg bar dictator!'' they chanted and tweeted and YouTubed ("Death to the dictator") in Farsi and English in Tehran in recent post-election rallies protesting the reported rigging that re-elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iranian president.
We saw how last November mobile Mumbaikars tweeted in real time about the Pakistani terrorist attack that killed 163 people, an event that highlighted the unprecedented role of new social media in our daily lives. And, in fact, tweeting about the Mumbai attack has become an important case study on American campuses.
"There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy," tweeted Janis Krums on January 15 with the photo of the US Airlines that had belly-landed on the Hudson River, not far from New York's LaGuardia airport where the plane was struck by a bird. Before news media crew could get to the scene, Americans were stunned watching the rescue of passengers tweet-picture by tweet-picture, ferry by ferry.
From cybercasting ethnic riots in China's Uighur and Iran's cheating mullahs to accidents, from airing personal grievances to promoting business and services, people are using Twitter in myriad ways. But if you tweet publicly, be careful. Someone might feel offended and file a defamation suit. That happened to a Chicago tenant Amanda Bonnen who tweeted, ''Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay.''
She was complaining about a water leak that had occurred in March making her apartment mouldy which Horizon Group Management, the realty company, had failed to fix. America is a litigious society and Horizon asked for $50,000 in damages, but whether the court takes it seriously or not is another matter especially when everyone from janitors to senators and Hollywood celebrities is urging us: Follow me on Twitter. Celebrities, who can't tweet, hire ghost Twitterers. But some do it themselves and get into trouble, as with Courtney Love.
Courtney Love, an American rock musician who was married to the grunge band Nirvana's singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain, tweeted against her clothes designer about excessive billing for custom clothing. She fumed in her shrill irreverent ungrammatical rant, ''oi vey don't f--- with my wardrobe or you will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead.'' Last March, Dawn Simorangkir, the clothes designer, filed a suit against Courtney in Los Angeles superior court for defamation, invasion of privacy and emotional distress, making it one of the myriad free speech (First Amendment) cases regarding the emerging social media. "The law is an ass" and can hit anyone with any leg at anytime, so a business should be careful before suing anyone.
The power of Twitter comes from its brevity and, as it evolves, it becomes a mass organising tool as well as a global listening post for the collective brain of a community. One reason why Barack Obama's presidential campaign was so successful against all odds was the deft use of social media including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, MySpace, BlackPlannet.com, LinkedIn and many others, which helped him raise millions of dollars to fund his political campaign. His message through the social media reached the younger tech-savvy mobile generation and his campaign kept the sites updated with the latest videos, photos and campaign messages.
Since entering the White House, Obama has continued to be in a political campaign mode, out of habit and out of necessity, especially when struggling to have his massive health reform Bill passed by Congress. Apart from hopping from one town hall meeting to another, he asks people on his website 'Organizing For America' to "Tweet Your Senator" and urge them to pass the health insurance reform measure that would guarantee health benefits to all Americans, something as revolutionary as the social security scheme passed by Franklin Roosevelt after the Great Depression. When people tweet, powers that be corporations, politicians, democrats or autocrats must heed their voices.
Courtney Love, an American rock musician who was married to the grunge band Nirvana's singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain, tweeted against her clothes designer about excessive billing for custom clothing. She fumed in her shrill irreverent ungrammatical rant, ''oi vey don't f--- with my wardrobe or you will end up in a circle of corched eaeth hunted til your dead.'' Last March, Dawn Simorangkir, the clothes designer, filed a suit against Courtney in Los Angeles superior court for defamation, invasion of privacy and emotional distress, making it one of the myriad free speech (First Amendment) cases regarding the emerging social media. "The law is an ass" and can hit anyone with any leg at anytime, so a business should be careful before suing anyone.
The power of Twitter comes from its brevity and, as it evolves, it becomes a mass organising tool as well as a global listening post for the collective brain of a community. One reason why Barack Obama's presidential campaign was so successful against all odds was the deft use of social media including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, MySpace, BlackPlannet.com, LinkedIn and many others, which helped him raise millions of dollars to fund his political campaign. His message through the social media reached the younger tech-savvy mobile generation and his campaign kept the sites updated with the latest videos, photos and campaign messages.
Since entering the White House, Obama has continued to be in a political campaign mode, out of habit and out of necessity, especially when struggling to have his massive health reform Bill passed by Congress. Apart from hopping from one town hall meeting to another, he asks people on his website 'Organizing For America' to "Tweet Your Senator" and urge them to pass the health insurance reform measure that would guarantee health benefits to all Americans, something as revolutionary as the social security scheme passed by Franklin Roosevelt after the Great Depression. When people tweet, powers that be corporations, politicians, democrats or autocrats must heed their voices.
The writer is professor, communications and diplomacy, Norwich University, US.
