So I got my first dose of Live Tweeting the other day. It was an interesting experience, I felt a range of emotions, from being cutting edge in my reporting, to being kinda rude by having my head down in my smartphone while some really awesome people name Susan and Tyrone talked about their beautiful images and adventures in Brazil at their gallery opening at EMU on Saturday.
Live Tweeting, while an interesting concept seems to me to be a great challenge. The truth is, the people reading your tweets need to be informed enough to be able to catch the drift of what you are tweeting about, but you are limited in how much you can say. In many ways it is an art form. Then again, for the person live tweeting, it is frustrating (at least for me) because I just want to stand there and listen to them, take in wholly their presentation, their words, the experiences they share, and that is really hard when you are just trying to pull out quotable phrases.
Some will argue that Live Tweeting can actually be done after an event is over, but c’mon, that doesn’t feel live. Someone tweets – “what a clutch strikeout by Weaver in the bottom of 7th #Angels surviving” I already know that the Angels blew the game in the 9th inning. So Live Tweeting can’t work in that circumstance.
I’m open to others opinions on why live tweeting is important, and maybe it is just that I am caught up on the word “Live”. To me it seems like another excuse to not make eye contact, or to exist in two different worlds (reality & cyber) when we should really just be putting down our devices and giving hard working people our attention, regardless of the event that is going on.
Live Tweeting to me needs to go the way of the dodo. You want to rename it something else, how about “multi tweets” or “event tweets”, but as long as the word live is connected, I know I will have a hard time doing it.
I go to events to take them in and experience them. If you choose not to, I feel bad for you, and don’t think that my attention being taken away from the event, so you can get a dose of what is going on is fair to me.
32 going on 19 