Andy T-Bone Carvin
I've been following Andy Carvin's twitter feed for a little over a month. Well you know, we all want to change the world. What I've decided -- before all else, is that that man needs a nickname. Why should only musicians, baseball players, and crime types get nick names? So I gave him one, in the title Andy "T-Bone" Carvin. Andrew Carvin a Senior Strategist with NPR started doing something a little special with his twitter account toward the end of January. As the protests in Tunisia grew and forced a change in government there, and similar protests got under way in Egypt he create a Twitter list of personal and institutional contacts from middle eastern countries and began to follow them in a real time probing conversation. Like an old fashioned party line anyone could pick up and eaves-drop on NPR's Andy Carvin on Tracking and Tweeting Revolutions | The Rundown News Blog | PBS NewsHour. "Curating a list" this behavior is often called. He did this from his office (I suppose NPR gives him one), from home, from Metro, from trains, airplanes, and he did it 15 to 18 hours a day. Because of the outward similarity to being a moderator in a old school news group I misunderstood the comprehensiveness, ambition and novelty of the endeavor in its early days. Mistaking it for an ad hoc event run amok What Makes @ACarvin Tweet? (TCTV). Eventually the longer I stayed with it the more deeply impressed I was by it. While realizing at the same time that it wasn't really working for me. The human mind, and its the senses are designed to take in large scale rapidly changing information (sight), particularized ones, (touch taste), or work in the background (hearing). Unfortunately for twitter interpreting textual information on a computer screen was not part of our original design spec. More of a tertiary learned skill for humans. One I'm sure is pushing adaptive evolution, but one capable of being over-whelmed currently. I was already following three dozen or so people on twitter. A number at least a standard deviation below the mean, an outlier among people "serious about twitter". After hitting the green button to 'follow' Andy Carvin I found the tweets were coming in at one to three hundred an hour. Twitter at that point stopped being interesting, fun or, from a practical standpoint, effectively informative. Nothing could be made from it, no narrative reconstructed from undifferentiated water rushing over a breached dam. I had the sense that maybe if the same information were presented by voice it might be possible to keep up with it, like radio. Links being so many references and cutaway segments to weave in and out of. Like a headline news broadcast off to the side. Something less insistent than scrolling text. Reading requires no small degree of focus attention and energy. Casual scanning doesn't help much. Twitter is already a compacted medium there are few words in a tweet to skip over. Everything is a key word. I initiated some partially successful attempts to deal with it. My first preference was to continue follow Carvin. So I created sublists of my twitter follows. Each shaped to a purpose and on-topic. Perhaps no single sublist will get out of hand. The problem is these sublists don't behave well. They often don't auto-update and they don't immediately (or ever) fill in tweets when you have been away from them for a while. They don't really behave like a time line. A more robust version of this first is to form several distinct twitter accounts for each reason you have. A second preference is to not formally follow @acarvin at all, but simply bring up his twitter page or list as needed. This last is probably the best approach for someone not desiring to become a twitter power-user or loading more than tweet deck on their machine. I sometimes wondered about what sort of physical set up Carvin was using, what would be the best set up to accomplish a task like this. Ideally you would want two screens, or some manner in which you could have twitter, al Jazeera and e-mail all open at the same time without overlapping windows. They do make small (13") battery operated screens designed to be a dual screen for laptops. You could use OSX's "spaces" to group and switch between windows. But as well in the Apple iPod/iPad world you can use those devices as outriggers to a laptop -- there is an app for that Air Display Avatron Software.
I'm going to pause just a moment here and introduce another angle of all this before everyone becomes undetachably convinced that something magical is happening here and this is the obvious Future of Journalism. This is more of a nod to Evgeny Morozov, than against Carvin. A skeptics position on the new media (Internet) Shangri-La. The idea that despotism can not stand up to web 2.0. A lot has been said about this; a good quick introduction perhaps is this New Yorker piece which looks at it in terms of NeverBetters versus BetterNevers, and EverWasers How the Internet Gets Inside Us : The New Yorker. Twitter et al. can be used to follow a revolution, but not make a revolution. It can be used as a dissemination and comment vehicle, not an organization tool at a point of crisis. Those gaining information in this manner must remind themselves they follow the event at a remove. Secondly the ability of governments, intelligence agencies to monitor and disrupt, or shape telecommunications is great, their learning curve moves across the terrain swiftly -- you can fool them once, but rarely twice The Autocrats' Learning Curve | Foreign Policy. No matter how new vital and web 2.0 these tools are, it is all very brittle because they all relay on basic tc/ip and sms protocols, telephone lines, cellular networks and these are all in the hands of the state.
The non utopian needs of news which social media processes might answer for boil down to two primary things: Delivery and Inclusion. Delivery it appears desires ubiquity and currency. People want instantaneous news, and they want it where ever they are: real-time and participatory. The second thing I think I saw here was a strong desire to hear from authentic voices. Authenticity presumes agency in the unfolding event and some applied filter for misrepresentation and irrelevance. Current news process provide this but prior to Andy Carvin not at the speed of SMS and social media sharing, not at the speed of a modern revolutions. There were things about this I thought Andy Carvin did right and wrong. Things wrong include transcribing speeches by politicians into twitter. Most of theses speeches were covered fully, often live, by broadcasters, with access to the US market. Transcribed in print that day or the next. In the meantime it was more than sufficient to summarize and quote. Another thing I think he did wrong was to work alone, to try to do this by himself. I often felt while reading over these tweets that this would've been benefited from some form of tag team arrangement. One person riding herd on the tweets and retweetings, another trying to maintain a measure of perspective and summary from a range of sources. For all I know he had interns and was doing this. It didn't seem so.
Another thing I thought he didn't do was fully conceptualize this project in terms of the user. I could never tell who he thought his users were, I knew early on it wasn't me. And I felt it differed from traditional conceptions of a News consumer Was he working as a private albeit informed citizen to a collection of peers? Was he working as a journalist creating a new News product, a service for informed insiders (peers, revolutionaries, revolution support infrastructure)? Did his coverage bias the reader towards a simplistic sympathy for an artificially conceived common man, the underdog? Or correct a bias away from the common man of the Arab world who is too readily identified as a hostile other, distorting our view of where the American interest lies The Revolution Will Be Tweeted : NPR . There were many things right about this exercise. He leveraged a network of activist contacts from previous professional work. He made adaptive use of a distributed text network service (twitter) freely existing on the web. Twitter was ideal in this circumstance, low frills, low bandwidth, immediate iterative continually updating. And through lists and hash-tags capable of a considerable degree of fine and dynamic tuning Twitter Feed Evolves Into a News Wire About Egypt - NYTimes.com. He brought a journalistic mindset to the game. Challenging people for their sources of information and for conformation of information, facts over rumor and ardor. What he did was to curate, an overused phrase these days, no edit. He was not rewriting peoples copy, or demanding of them inverted pyramids (at least not j-school ones). He proceeding largely by retweeting others, Striking a balance between tweets and retweets The Art of the RT: NPR[base ']s Andy Carvin Tweets the Libyan Revolution | VF Daily | Vanity Fair. The information particularly visual information, videos and pictures, had passing through no filters no hesitant institutional sensibilities along the way. they were raw. Lastly it should be mentioned he attracted a lot of good attention through this and raised money for NPR with the improvisational "GaveForAndy" campaign #gave4andy: Andy Carvin and the ad hoc pledge drive » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism.
In a revolutionary fecund world, there is the possibility for authoritarian regimes dislodging in nations across every continent, popping off like cheap buttons on a good shirt. Democratic self-rule is far from the norm. Among those who rule -- even where democracy is nominally practiced -- there is no particular love for it. Business is none of the people's business. In the lands of the proletariat abject fear of the people is palpable. Everyone checks themselves for spots and hopes their neighbor has the fortitude to shoot enough of their owns citizens to keep the dominos from toppling. But there is the problem. It is one thing to conceive of a project like twitter curation to cover a landmark, climatic, and finite event. it is less clear if this can be as useful going forward to cover such news with an increasingly regular extreme cast. There will be significant churn to human affairs for a generation it won't be possible for any nation to remain isolated from it. Everyone's news will demand to become our own.
"Kick over the wall cause governments to fall, how can you refuse it.
Let Fury have the hour Anger can be power don't you know that you can use
it" - Clash, Clampdown
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