IN THE age of the 140 character tweet, to make readers consider a series of ideas that are conveyed beyond the number of words in this sentence is every writer's challenge.
For sure there is potential for discipline and art in the haiku-like format of the tweet. But the bite-size approach to the delivery of content makes all the more clearer Marshall McLuhan's observation about contemporary practices of communication and how this reflects once again certain features of our shared social lives.
The fast and short medium of the tweet is the message.
There are other variations of this fast food approach to how we send and "consume" information in this day and age. The Facebook status message has become the ubiquitous banner headline of our personal lives where our idealized lifestyles are broadcasted for the inhabitants of our social universe's consumption or regurgitation.
All of a sudden our misadventures towards the path of alienating consumerism in the form of posted foodie and selfie pictures are breaking news on the social media platform. To the uninitiated these refer to mouth-watering pictures of expensive food and the contorted semi-naked approximations of hotness that we like the world to see as our presentation of digital selves.
Thus, we can make of two tendencies about how information is relayed and received nowadays, no doubt facilitated by internet connectivity as a productive force. It should be immediate and narcissistic just like fastfood.
Much has been said about the World Wide Web and the shrinking global village but two decades after Hillary Clinton, the promise of the net as a democratizing platform remains as such, a dead-end promise. For what has the net become in the year 2013 but an online version of a fast food burger joint or a high school cafeteria where the jocks, nerds, and [insert demographic here] occupy their own tables and create their own self-referential din of noise independent from each other. No thanks to Zuckerberg.
That is why I believe spaces like this, the opinion page of a newspaper and by extension newspaper production in the age of the digital, remain important bastions of a type of communication that follow a different tact. Instead of fast and furious tweets, we, column writers and newspaper staff offer contemplation and or discourse.
Narcissism, take a backseat to a passionate desire to connect and explain with the end goal of creating a more inclusive and progressive community (save for the few welcome occasions when column writers fall in love or wax poetic).
Implicit in the very format of the opinion page and the newspaper are the wagers that are set in exchange for the privilege of being printed - the names of column writers, reporters, and ultimately the Editor in Chief to whom aggrieved parties can send threats to.
It is a totally different ballgame on print I realized. And I agree with fellow columnist Giano Libot on his May 9, 2013 column that despite the much vaunted death of the medium, the format still has relevance. Newspaper production is still important precisely because it challenges the consume-and-discard idiom that rule new media these days.
Furthermore, the key difference between print and new media is the in-roads of institutionalized practices of accountability and the strong regard for the public good that characterizes the former. After all, the important matters involving our polity are not resolved instantaneously with the click of the like button or a mood meter.
So if you reached this last paragraph dear reader, this means that there is yet hope for a form of media that is deliberate and inclusive, one that contributes to disciplined and productive social discourse.
It somehow proves that we can still talk and listen to each other beyond 140 characters, instead of merely mumbling in our corner of the net, in bite-size portions jejemon style, like many of the twits do on the net.
from: http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cagayan-de-oro/opinion/2013/06/11/alamon-twits-286852
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