During the class I taught at VCU this spring, we talked a lot about Twitter and how it has changed the way we get our news. Life in 140-character snippets.
Twitter, we concluded, has its uses. It is a terrific tool to drive traffic to Web sites and get information out there quickly. It is not, however, a be-all, end-all for news and insight. Sometimes, you need more than 140 characters to get the job done.
This is not a knock on any of the people covering the Nats as much as it is a little frustration with my (and our) growing reliance on new media. Call it a knock on Twitter if you will.
I can't even remember where the "tweet" came from (new word added to our lives, thanks to Twitter). I follow pretty much everything that moves related to the Nats and it's often funny to see up to a dozen tweets come in pretty much at the same time, detailing every move. Just wait until you-know-who gets called up. It will be a regular Tweet fest. Jee-SUS has toed the rubber. Jee-SUS has the sign. Jee-SUS is in his windup. Jee-SUS throws. WOW. JESUS. ANOTHER K.
Anyway, I saw Bruney's "I don't feel I'm a minor-league pitcher" come across on Twitter and my first reaction was not good. Yeah? Well, you're hardly a major-league pitcher. And so on and so forth.
Seeing the complete quote in the full Nationals.com story changes things. Context is indeed everything. Taken as part of his overall, very solid commentary on the situation, it isn't bad. It's the kind of attitude you want a pitcher to have.
He knows he didn't get the job done. He firmly believes he's better than he's shown but that didn't show up. So he'll see what happens and go from there. Nothing wrong with those comments at all.
I wish him well and hope it works out somewhere for him, even in Washington if he gets a map to the strike zone and figures out how to follow it.
I also promise to try and wait to react when I see a snippet of something on Twitter. At least until the multiple "You Know Who is On the Way" comes in.
Then I will go completely crazy. My own tweet at that moment will read YESSSSS(as many S's as I can fit in the allowed space. I guess that will be 138 of them).
1 comment:
You're preaching to the choir in my case. ;-) I don't do Twitter, for news or otherwise, and I absolutely agree that context is very important. IMO, that's an issue on the Internet generally, not only on Twitter.
I also think that it's particularly important to correct incomplete or erroneous information in online venues, because information spreads and is linked to so quickly. I also think that Internet use is one element that has contributed to a decline in critical thinking skills generally, but I will spare you that particular curmudgeonly rant here. :-)
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