Twitter

Pearson

Description

Twitter

Informations

• Publié par: irisewud
• Nombre de lectures: 103
• Langue: Français

Extrait

8

Twitter

W

OULD YOU LIKE EVERYONE IN THE WORLD TO KNOW WHAT

movie you just saw or are going to see, what you really think of your teacher or boss or

president, what you just ate for lunch or intend to eat, whether it’s raining or the

police are charging where you happen to be—any and all of those things, and more,

whatever you might want the world to know—just a second or so after you had the

thought or experience and got the impulse to broadcast it to the world? Twitter makes

it easy for you to do all of that.

You can disseminate whatever information you please, to whatever portion of the

world you like, as long as the people in that portion have accounts on Twitter. That

would be 32 million people in the world at large as of May 2009, with Twitter growing

faster than any other social medium (Schonfeld, 2009), and the first tweet from outer

space on May 12, 2009 (Van Grove, 2009).

Further, you can do that from your cellphone, BlackBerry, or any other mobile

device at hand that can access the Internet.

Concerned about your privacy? Like all online systems, you can do this under a

pseudonym or assumed identity. You can even adopt the name of a television star

or character (see Chapter 2 for “Mad Men” characters on Twitter). Or you can be a

member of Congress (see Donnelly, 2009), or a well-known public figure such as

Karl Rove (Carpenter, 2009), and tweet under your real name. Rick Sanchez and

Don Lemon of CNN; David Shuster, Nora O’Donnell and Tamron Hall of MSNBC;

and “Meet the Press” anchor David Gregory actively use Twitter (as of February

2009) and work twitters they receive into their television news shows, in another

example of old and new new media cooperation.

Welcome to the burgeoning world of “microblogging,” or the publication and

dissemination online of a line or two about yourself, or anything you might like to say,

personally or politically, anytime you please. Twitter is the new kid on the media block,

started as a project by Odeo podcasting people Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and

Evan Williams in March 2006. But it has been growing so fast, not only in high-profile

133

C

H

A

P

T

E

R