One word... Twitter... I never really thought I would find myself going to twitter mode of communication but man when one thinks about it, it could be a blessing and a curse all in the same breath. Me being a communications junkie-- again, I am a Ph.D. student soon to be candidate in mass communications and media studies-- I am both in awe and running for cover as this new modality of communication really begins to take flight. In regard, I think something like twitter is great for closed communications with families... In my case at one time we actually had a family news letter called the Russell Pipeline. It was a tabloid paper which kept all members of the family-- Russell/Alexander/Robinson/Chavis/Howell and other extensions in the family know. The tabloid was put together in MS Word and then sent via email to everyone who chose to subscribe. The effort to put the newsletter together was pretty great as we can see now that our chief layout officer is among the dearly departed. When she died, publication ceased... But with twitter, no longer is the family limited by the modality of delivery but instead limitations are nullified. Everyone has a mobile phone that has the ability to function dually as a PDA-or personal data assistant... As there was the MTV Generation, Generation X then Generation Y well there now is a Blackberry Generation that strangely has a retroactive effect. As we are in a hypermedia environment, the bubble we live in media saturated. Information is available 24/7/365 and boudaries again are only of the imagination. Hence going back to the family conundrum I was talking about previously. Whereas an document had to be drafted and then distributed via email, twitter nullifies that where messages are sent out in 140 characters or less. Photos can be sent instantly. In fact JR was the subject of my latest tweet--tweet simply is the content delivered through the medium called twitter. Now to me, certainly not to him when he is a teenager, this great family history which can be shared with everyone. Of course if twitter were around when I was a teen and my mother and her aunts knew how to use it, those lousy report cards I brought home, as well as the time I tap danced on the console television would be damning to my family social capital. In plain Russpeak, I would have been on the Russell Robinson Ass-whipping Tour 0f 1982 which would have started with a kick off concert in Raleigh, NC going up 85 to Palmer Springs Va, heading through I 95 to Maryland, with two stops in Philadelphia, PA and two sold out concerts in New York City. Mind you in 1982, long distance telephone calls cost money so instead of multiple calls, bad news in our family became in my case viral. One person told another, that person told two others and so on so on and so on.. Like that old shampoo commercial. That's the bad side of twitter.
The potential for communication to become viral and defamatory all at the same time. With twitter, information is not policed, so depending upon my social capital or as they call it clout, if I say something negative about someone whom I just don't give two cents for (and trust me there are plenty of people in that category) but I have lets say 10,000 people who actually listen, and they tell folks, I could make somebody's life pretty miserable. Lets say I know somebody who has access to those 10,000 and I still put something out that is not favorable about my social mark, that person is officially blasted... The funny thing is that that again, the first amendment grants immunity for this hit because cyberspace is the new final frontier and last I checked, the FCC didn't have that much jurisdiction there.... So in the words of the Captain in one of my classic films Cool Hand Luke, "What We've Got Here is Failure to Communicate." No in fact we have the exact opposite, what now has to be determined is who are the social media haves, the have nots, and those in between.
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