Is this how we become addicted to social media?
I met an online acquaintance for a glass of beer Sunday night. He was in town on his way to a business trip. Also met a colleague from my employer. The arrangements for this meet-up were made exclusively via a conversation over several days on Twitter.
The meet-up started with a tweet by Ryan Sholin on April 22. It ended with another confirming the location on Sunday morning — and a glass of Harp at the Dubliner.
A week earlier, I met a local blogger for lunch to talk about a project idea. Again, those arrangements were made largely via a Twitter discussion.
I’m fascinated by the phenomenon. I’d never met Ryan before in my life and we converged on a place at a time because we both frequent Twitter — and kept up enough with our twitterfeeds to make the arrangements come together.
I’ve always marveled, too, at how my daughter can make arrangements with a bunch of friends through Facebook — often with virtually no confirmation that the message was received on the other end.
I’m not sure I could go as far as she and her friends do. I love the myriad ways of keeping in touch, but I fear I’m a little too anal to make complicated plans without a concrete confirmation. I suppose that’s how all these tools hook us, eh? We get started, then realize we can’t stray too far or we might miss a critical blog post, an urgent tweet, a poignant note on my news feed.
Teens have a healthy look at txting vs. writing
Thanks to my colleague Tim Barker at my employer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I saw the news about the Pew Internet & American Life study about teens and writing.
The headline from the report: “Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.”
I know my two children do a lot of writing — both for school and for “pleasure.” In fact, it often blows my mind how frequently my daughter and her boyfriend text each other, rather than simply push fewer keys and have a phone conversation. But, as she’d say, “whatever…” Read more
Incredibly gracious swan song from a former boss
Please indulge a brief tribute to a former boss, who “parted ways” with the Tribune Company this week — involuntarily, based on his swan-song post on his popular blog, Online News Squared. Scott Anderson is another victim of the struggling newspaper industry.
If faced with the same situation, may I have as much grace as Scott does in his post, after working for Tribune for 27 years: “That a company could love, nurture, encourage (and tolerate) someone for that long a stretch is a testament to the soul, heart and greatness of Mama T in her prime.”
Twice during my career, Scott was my boss, when we both worked for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel — a Tribune newspaper. Two stories: Read more
Twitter, please let me keep loving you
First, a hearty hello after about a weeklong hiatus, thanks in part to the visit from my parents. It was great to see Dave and Ro for several days. And it would have been flat rude to sit around blogging while they were visiting. I’ll tell’em you said hi.
Second, during my hiatus, I noted Jack Lail’s recent post about the Twitter account “RU4Real” and the thousands of people it is following — as an experiment to see how many people pay attention to what they follow. (As an aside, that account is now following 5,911 people and has 163 followers.)
After about a year of Twitter membership (four months of which was trying to figure out what it was all about), I now have 122 followers — and I’m following 105.
Obviously, the more people you follow and the more people who follow you, the more often you get followed. What I’m finding, however, is that I’m getting followed more and more often by Twit-spammers, which means I’m spending more time investigating the people who follow me. Read more
Newspaper reporters need to get over the snobbery
I was struck by this item, which I came across on the Romenesko blog. The item is a Q&A with CNBC’s Charles Gasparino, in which he says, “Most print reporters think TV reporters are idiots. But that’s usually before they go on TV for the first time and totally freeze up (as I have done more than once).”
In my experience, that’s been true. I recall being in my graduate school journalism program, in which I harbored a similar opinion, cracking wise about the fact that it didn’t matter whether broadcast journalists knew how to spell — nobody read their work anyway. (Note: I actually said that to a fellow intern on the TV side of the internship program — and she ended up marrying me anyway.) Read more
Kurt's Tweets- Realizing how woefully out of touch I have been with this part of the county. (@ Saint Louis Bread Company) http://4sq.com/5z5Bfh
- Just had my first Gmail phone call -- with my parents -- and the quality was fantastic. Wow. http://tcrn.ch/a8GndI
- Another day, another interview. Fingers crossed. (@ Saint Louis Bread Co) http://4sq.com/avGImL
- Helping my son learn the first 20 elements on the periodic table. Disturbed by how many more elements there are since I studied this stuff.
- Giving blood. (@ St. Martin's Episcopal Church) http://4sq.com/aiWuEk