reality BYTES

21 February 2010 By Adrian Weckler If any Ryan Tubridy, Terry Prone or John Waters is reading this, they should stop now. The following column might irritate. That’s because it’s about technology. And the internet. And forms of communicating that don’t involve hundreds of hours of poise, middlemen and ‘understandings’. In Ireland, there is a strong tradition of pulling the plug on disruptive technology. E-voting was the best example: an entirely fixable system that was vilified, mainly by establishment cliques (politicians, journalists and other parties who would have lost electionweek influence).P-pars was another example (of sorts). Mobhaile is the latest casualty. It was a decent, cheap community portal system that local councils decided to sniff at, as it wasn’t their idea. So the entire concept got rubbished, with no one, except the developers, taking flak for it. There is a similar pretentious, protectionist culture around the adoption of Twitter in Ireland. While news agencies in other modern countries have adopted it as a significant way of spreading and debating news issues, Irish media establishment flunkies sit back and sneer. Sporting leather briefcases and allowing suspiciously well-worn literary classics (or Moleskine notebooks) to protrude from their coat pockets (but only in public), these worthies effect disdain for gee-whiz cyber services. Depending on their particular spot in the limelight, Twitter is a) frivolous and exhibitionist b) an affront to decency or c) devilish because it bypasses the ‘normal way of doing things’. Thankfully, the influence of people spouting this pretentious nonsense is on the wane. So it was that, last week, the chairman of the Green Party, Dan Boyle, chose Twitter as his forum for expressing his lack of confidence in Willie O’Dea. The remarks exacerbated an already tense situation and must have greatly added to the political discomfiture of the government. Boyle’s remarks were dissected and debated by Twitter users for hours, just as Senator Déirdre de Búrca’s resignation blog-post had been, a week before. Moleskine media consumers learned of Boyle’s remarks much later, effectively becoming the second tier of ‘those in the know’. A similar phenomenon had occurred ten days before, when George Lee resigned. While some traditional media sources had the Lee resignation at about the same time as blogs and Twitter, most only got the story an hour or two later. And mainly through blogs or Twitter. Whether the Moleskineers and book-club radio presenters like it or not, Twitter has become a must have service for those seeking the latest news. Twitter is not always first with the dissemination of a story. And it never actually produces a story. (But then how often does Morning Ireland, the Nine O’Clock news, or any other news bulletin?) What Twitter does is to curate and publish news stories that are unknown to the general public. So to all those who smirk and shrug at the mention of Twitter, know this: you are now a second-tier news consumer. You’re outside the loop. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Being behind on the latest story is entirely a personal choice. Not knowing what up to 50,000 other people are buzzing about isn’t the end of the world. Nor is being late in finding out about a senior politician’s resignation. So carry on. We’ll let you know when anything important happens. http://www.thepost.ie/technology/reality-bytes-47466.html