The death of broadcasting is a big story. You may not have heard about it if you still get your news from radio and television broadcasts; Brian Williams and Katie Couric seem to be a little reticent about covering it, but it’s all over the inter-webs. There seems to be a little confusion as to who is to be credited with the scoop—Joe Trippi was an early poster with 2004’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and deserves points for first person empiricism—but media critics the world over have been writing obituaries for years now. The story goes something like this: Marconi and Edison and Telsa and the rest bequeathed unto the world the power to disseminate information everywhere. Instantly. And there were villains, like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who used this Promethean gift for evil, and there were heroes, like NBC counter-propagandist Edward R. Murrow, who used it for good. But then came a series of tubes called the Interned and suddenly everything changed. Instantly.
I’m of the belief that nothing changes instantly, especially not anything as culturally and socially pervasive as broadcasting. Broadcasting is dead? Long live broadcasting. The sinister seduction of the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ has gotten the better of too many. Bloggers and scholars alike need to learn to resist the temptation to announce, from atop their stack of books about how Web 2.0 is changing everything, as if it were the first time anyone thought of it, that Web 2.0 is changing everything. I can write this with conviction because one thing about which we can be absolutely certain is that nothing changes everything. Broadcasting is a fitting example—most poignantly because now the most efficient way the procrastinate, sitting at a computer to write a blog post, is to watch streaming video of Meet the Press. More generally, though, just because to write it off is to fundamentally misunderstand its function.
The current era of blogging, according to media theorist Andrew Chadwick, was really ushered in by the 2004 presidential election. This, he argues, is when blogs hit the mainstream. He also argues that sites like the Drudge Report and Daily Kos, that hit the big time during that race, are now consumed more like traditional media. He even goes further, making the case that as the bandwith grows and big media institutions figure out this mysterious virtual world, we’ll all one day look around and discover that everything has changed, but nothing has changed. I’m partial to this version of the story, but only because Chadwick’s wet blanket style is refreshing in this world of wide-eyed ‘future of media’ speculation. There are, however, a few important details he fails to notice. Chief among these is the compelling counterpoint exemplified by this year’s Palo Alto social media ‘It Girl,’ a clever little micro-blogging utility called Twitter.
Twitter is a service that enables users to type (from a stationary computer) or, more importantly, SMS a message that is automatically delivered to everyone who subscribes to, or ‘follows,’ their Twitter feed. The critical detail about how this works is that each message, called a Tweet, must be fewer than 160 characters, shorter than an SMS. So Tweets are small, very small, and, if the trend persists, abundant. Twitterers Tweet often, and usually not to communicate important information—although one Egyptian man did Twitter his way out of political imprisonment. Tweets are for the minutia of daily life, they are trivial and inane, much like the blog format before The Huffington Post and the like started using it for actual news and aspiring writers started using it for self promotion. Like Facebook status updates, they’re supposed to be the answer to the question ‘what are you doing?’ If there was ever a question that could almost guarantee a trite, banal answer, it is this question. Hard to believe, then, that the answers 1,974,030 Twitterers are providing could be the force sustaining the Revolution, isn’t it?
Chadwick was not alone in predicting that the Empire would strike back against our flattening or opening or participating or user-generating heroes, but few predicted that a couple of nerds announcing the content of their breakfasts to the world would be piloting the Millennium Falcon. And they should have. Here’s why: The story of the death of broadcasting has been told as the victory of the small over the big. The story of the annexation of new media’s open, democratic, participatory cyberspace Shangri-La by major media institutions is also about big (and few) versus small (and many), but this time Big gets its revenge. These narratives make for real page turners, and they correctly cast big as perpetually opposed to small, but their conceit, like that of every thriller, is that the hero and villain need each other—they are, in fact, defined by each other. Neither can die, there’s always a sequel.
Broadcasting will survive—maybe on TiVos, maybe on iPhones, maybe just in a browser window—it doesn’t really matter where, but it will remain part of our media landscape. This assertion is based on an interpretation of the social and cultural function of broadcasting according to which it is defined as the Big. I define the broadcast media of our time as that which distributes content intended to be consumed by everybody and that which is consumed, likely by fewer than everybody, with the perception that it could, potentially, be consumed by everybody. Yes, there are a lot of text-based websites that fit in this category and, yes, I am aware that I am taking liberties with the word. Bear with me, though, because I am primarily concerned with that which is not broadcasting by this definition. I think the way broadcasting, undead, adapts to the online world is interesting because it casts a new light on the difference between big and small.
The old small, the small of 1998, was anything you could read online. Remember the phrase ‘global village’? That was how we used to think about the web; it was a community. Communities are small, they are groups of people who feel like their part of something shared. Communities still exist online, but now the Internet looks a lot like the real world: expansive, unfamiliar, with someone selling something around every corner. It gets too feel a lot less like a village after the fiftieth or sixtieth time someone offers to help enlarge your member. Now, just like in the real world, communities are isolated and membership is defined by specific commonalities. Media communities, closed cultural and intellectual ecosystems where everyone agrees The Wire is the best show on television and Anne Coulter is the antichrist (or 24 is the best show on television and Anne Coulter is kinda hot), are the small media, where everyone knows your name.
Small media communities are where the online world is flat, and open, and participatory. It is within these communities that users generate content—these spaces seemingly rest a hand on our shoulders and say ‘go ahead, share, post, you’re among friends.’ The smallest of the small media is Twitter. And the most tightly knit of communities are those composed of people who care about what one another had for breakfast. That’s why Twitter is an increasingly important feature of our new media world. Steven Baker advances a slightly different theory in a recent Business Week article titled “Why Twitter Matters;” he quotes Biz Stone, one of the service’s co-founders, claiming it could grow by a factor of 100 and become “something people use every day.” He makes a few good points, but never manages to put together an argument more sophisticated than a series of variations on the assertion that Twitter is important because individuals and organizations are using it. His most persuasive point? Barack Obama uses Twitter.
Indeed he does. He’s currently the third most followed Twitterer using the service, with 41,676 followers according to TwitDir. Of course, Obama doesn’t personally write his Tweets-stuff like “in Chicago, holding an economic discussion with the Democratic governors”-he just goes about his business while some enthusiastic Dartmouth grad periodically tells his adoring followers all about it in 160 characters or less, occasionally soliciting donations. It’s significant that there are 41,676 people engaged enough in his campaign to want to know what he’s doing all the time, but now that the national spotlight is shining in the Junior Senator from Illinois, Chris Matthews could probably tell them. The point is that these people are part of a special little (very large) club, and being part of the club means interacting with their candidate differently than the way the rest of the world does. He’s part of their community, he checks in every once in a while to make sure they know what he’s up to.
As Jerry Langton pointed out in the Toronto Star a couple of months back, the content of a Tweet is only important in the way it characterizes the relationship between Twitterers and followers. He provided a revealing quote from Jason Pontin, publisher of Technology Review: “the only people in the world who might be interested in my twittering—my family, my close friends—were precisely the ones who would be entertained and comforted by their triviality.” Twittering and following, like Facebook friending, are methods of structuring mediated relationships, largely through the symbolic exchange of drivel. Businesses, interest groups, and politicians—as they have on Facebook—are figuring out how to use the social norms formed in these spaces by early adopters (who actually know each other) to reconceive the ways they communicate with customers and constituents. The goal, as always, is to build communities.
Twitter was developed by a guy named Evan Williams, who happens to also be the guy who invented the software that became Blogger, now a Google product. Blogger was initially built as a way for people working on a project together to collaborate more efficiently (Shirky, 187). This it has in common with Twitter, which is now being used as a productivity tool by organizations ranging from CNN to H&R Block (Baker). The Obama campaign would like to consider their Twittering a mode of online collaboration, too, since they go to great lengths to encourage supporters feel like stakeholders, and even partners, in their White House bid. Twitter shouldn’t be credited with much of a contribution to this effort, but it’s worth noting that the McCain campaign only has a handful of unofficial feeds, the biggest of which followed by just over a thousand people. If nothing else, this indicates which campaign’s communication style is better suited to the culture of the medium, the culture of small.
Using a productivity tool as a communication tool has its advantages when it comes to politics. Clay Shirky points out, concluding his discussion of Twitter in Here Comes Everybody, that “any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political.” I would take this observation a few steps further. Once a person perceives themselves to be part of a group—be it a class, ethnicity, union, industry lobby, or Wednesday evening bridge club—they become a politically relevant social unit. Individuals are only political as groups. Indeed, the formation and mobilization of groups is politics. But just signing people up is hardly enough; it’s about persuading people to perceive themselves as part of a group, weaving group identity through individual identity.
Twitter is an effective political communications tool because it lets an unlimited number of supporters feel like insiders. It’s infinitely scalable, but always retains its smallness. More importantly, it can be used for Rove-style coordinated point-diffusion messaging without corrupting the sense among (aptly named) “followers” that they’re participating in a shared project. Herein lies its genius: gather 41,676 avid supporters in a football arena and tell them, with charm, charisma, and oratorical flair, that a just universal health care system is the right of every American (or whatever) and some of them will become “Fired Up” and “Ready to Go”. Casually mention, in 160 terse characters, to the same number of people, dispersed across the country, that you’re in Baltimore attending a symposium on health care (or whatever), and your inner circle of devoted loyalists grows by 41,676 people.
