Barriers to understanding Twitter
In the wake of a truly ghastly series of articles on Twitter, I am beginning to think that journalists will never write well on any thing that involves online communities or social media.
Perhaps the problem is this simple: They just don’t have the time to spend on participating in these communities which a thorough understanding of these phenomena require. You can’t just sign up and click a few buttons. You’ve got to get involved. That’s time expensive when the deadlines are ticking.
This is why, I think, journalists continue to fall prey to the most outrageously ridiculous claims from those with titles within fields like psychology who claim to understand something about human interactions in the online world. Journalists just don’t know how to vet what’s being told to them from the “experts”.
