This past week, if you are a subscriber of Time Magazine, you know that Twitter was the cover story. Still think you can avoid getting into the twitter conversation? Here are a few quotes from Richard Stengel, Managing Editor of Time:
“At 7:45 A.M. on June 4, Steven Johnson sent a tweet to his more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, informing them that he had written this week’s cover story about how Twitter is changing the way society communicates. That tweet is also this week’s cover image. I know this is all a bit meta and like trying to capture digital lightning in a jar, but we thought it was a way of illustrating how new platforms and social networks are changing the way we communicate and live.
I would argue that Twitter is a uniquely democratic form of communication–that is, it’s open to everyone, there is no central authority, and people vote on whom and what they like by signing up to be followers. It’s about the wisdom–or folly–of crowds. It’s also, as Johnson observes in his superb piece, a prototype of a new kind of shared national experience: people talking to one another in real time about real events.
Some argue that Twitter is a form of digital narcissism, the toy of the moment for an attention-deficit-disordered culture. But as Johnson notes, the Twitter platform is ultimately about an accretion of tweets, the way hundreds of thousands of pixels form a detailed and complex digital image.
There’s a lesson in that for all of us in the media, for we must adapt to new technology, and not simply by putting the same old wine in new bottles. We need to adapt by creating our content in a way that is organic to those new mediums.”
