Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage. As I follow the remarkable political transformations ongoing in the Middle East and North Africa through social media, I’m struck by the depth of the difference between news curation and anchoring on Twitter versus Television. In this post, I’d like to argue that Television functions as a distancing technology while social media works in the opposite direction: through transparency of the process of narrative construction, through immediacy of the intermediaries, through removal of censorship over images and stories (television never shows the truly horrific pictures of war), and through person-to-person interactivity, social media news curation creates a sense of visceral and intimate connectivity, in direct contrast to television, which is explicitly constructed to separate the viewer from the events. Although it is the first factor most people think of, I believe that the distancing effect of TV isn’t just because TV is broadcast and social media is interactive.
Maria Popova: In a new world of informational abundance, content curation is a new kind of authorship. Editor’s Note: Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings, a curation of “cross-disciplinary interestingness” that scours the world of the web and beyond for share-worthy tidbits. Here, she considers how new approaches to curation are changing the way we consume and share information. Last week, Megan Garber wrote an excellent piece on whether Twitter is speech or text. Yet despite a number of insightful and timely points, I’d argue there is a fundamental flaw with the very dichotomy of the question.
While Twitter can certainly be both, it’s inherently neither. And trying to classify it within one or both of these conventional checkboxes completely misses the point that we might, in fact, have to invent an entirely new checkbox. I, of course, make no claim to using Twitter as it “should” be used. Twitter as discovery Like any appropriated buzzword, the term “curation” has become nearly vacant of meaning. And lest we forget, text itself is an invention, a technology. Seth Godin Talking about Leading a Tribe. Seth Godin Explains Why You Need a Tribe. Seth Godin on the tribes we lead.
Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice. Tony Robbins: Why we do what we do, and how we can do it better. Martin Luther King "I have a dream" Curation. Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action.
Derek Sivers: How to start a movement.