Twittering the Democrats’ Debate
by Sean Hackbarth
I’m liveblogging the Democrats’ debate on Twitter. Or at least until I get bored.
UPDATE: So far this debate hasn’t been nuclear war. Bummer.
2 Responses to “Twittering the Democrats’ Debate”
2
Eric, the limit is good. A constraint is useful. The Kenya tweet is powerful knowing the situation there.
All this twittering is intriguing to me. Twitter imposes a 140-character-limit on all tweets. The choice is technical, not aesthetic; most mobile-service providers won’t carry text messages longer than 160 characters. This limit, as with any restricted poetic form, is a strength. Foreign correspondents in the first half of the 20th century learned to write in cablese, a series of abbreviations demanded by news organizations that had to pay by the word.
Twitter, like cablese, favours observation rather than analysis.
The medium is hard to dismiss as a reporters’ tool, particularly in countries where cell-phone networks reach farther than the Internet. At 4:53 am local time on January 18, Juliana Rotich, a blogger in Kenya, tweeted in her own cablese, “in town nbi.i can smell tear gas in the air”.