Nice to see another journalist now in social media
Shel Israel gave a broad overview of the benefits that Twitter offers to us today. His main points:
- Social media allows any institution to listen and respond in ways that they could not previously.
- We don't hate large institutions because they're large. We hate them because they reduce us to eyeballs. We have had no recourse to respond to a deaf TV set. Now that we have Twitter, we have an avenue to respond.
- Twitter allows us see the real people behind the real jobs.
Woah, a second ending!
- What's the future of social media? We've gone through a period of an enormous innovation of tools. This is disruptive to most people in the world. They can't do what they've always done.
- The next step will be more boring: We will learn to implement these new social media tools. Social media will "normalize."
Great question from @sokunthea, of the Case Foundation, on social media and the future of journalism:
- Journalism schools are preparing students for jobs that won't exist. (Personally, I think this depends on the journalism school. I'm thankful for my j school education.)
- The journalism model started crumbling long before social media arrived.
- Israel believes social media has stepped into that void.
- Twitter is very fast and very shallow.
- There needs to be a professional organization that operates as a watch dog. We social media amateurs can't fill that void. But now there is a feed of citizen folks. These two components need to figure out how to work together.