The Blob: Moving Genres and the People They Eat Along the Way

So, Twitter has come under recent scrutiny for its part in Obama's recent speech to a joint session of Congress. Many senators and representative were Twittering while Obama gave his speech. Now the biggest criticism has been focused on ridiculousness of using Twitter at an event of such magnitude. Here is the lead to an article by Dana Milbank printed in the Seattle Times: "President Obama spoke of economic calamity and war Tuesday night in that solemn rite of democracy, the address to the joint session of Congress. In response, lawmakers whipped out their BlackBerrys and began sending text messages like high-school kids bored in math class."

The text messaging is referring to the Tweets. You are only allowed so many characters in one entry so the size and style of the tweet is similar to text messages. Now Twittering did not grow out of governmental discourse. It was the defected college Facebook crowd that made it big when they began moving from Facebook to Twitter. It was originally just a way to explain what you were doing at any point in time. But young people can't resist advocacy, and it quickly turned into a mini-blog (becuase you can only type a minimal amount as compared to a standard blog) where individuals were offering sharp, quick cultural commentary.

Now, this form eventually became so popular it expanded beyond the holds of the discourse that originally saw it to fruition. This was most visilbe in Obama's digital campain with his Twitterfeed, which reached the very same young people who made Twitter popular to begin with. Now President Obama currently has over 300,000 people following his Titterfeed (he has not updated since Dr. Martin Luther King Day). Sarah Palin now has a Twitter account. Governer Bobby Jindal has a Twitter account, on which he reminded his followers to watch his response to Obama's speach.

The possibilities for politicians to be more transparent about thier ideas are more wide open than ever before due to all the communication avenues being generated in the digital exapansion. So, why so much negativity about a Tweeting Congress? Well some of it has to do with people writing idiotic messgages. Take this example from the same article: "Then there was Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, in whose name this text message was sent at about the time the president spoke of the need to pull the country together: "Aggie basketball game is about to start on espn2 for those of you that aren't going to bother watching pelosi smirk for the next hour." A few minutes later, another message came through: 'Disregard that last Tweet from a staffer.'"

But some congress men and woman were offering decent commentary. So what is the problem? Well this is a genre that grew out a different discourse community with different agents (young people-upper level college student to young professional just out of college) with different values with different ideas about legitimate ways to communicate and connect with people. This gerne was not matured by the older generations represented in Congress. Instead, was literay forced upon then by popular demand. It is reasonable to susspect that they would not know what do with the power of instant connectivity and response. So, there were a few mishaps (news for enterntainment sake). But Twitter as a genre has the ability to engage people in conversation and call attention to certain issues. It puts ideas out on a wide market in an instant, quick accessible, and readable manner.

Take this comment from an article by Andy Carvin, NPR's social media strategist, "Flash forward to 2009, and I'm standing on the National Mall filing from Barack Obama's inauguration using tweets and text messaging, interacting directly with people around the world in real time. So it was appropriate that we spent a lot of time talking about Twitter, given how it's become perhaps the fastest tool for people to share news with the world."