LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Charlie Beckett

February 18th, 2009

BeebCamp 2: Twitter is only 1% but it's massive (and Gaming matters, too)

4 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Charlie Beckett

February 18th, 2009

BeebCamp 2: Twitter is only 1% but it's massive (and Gaming matters, too)

4 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

beebcamp.bmpI took two more relatively novel things out of this latest BBC Beeb Camp: the significance of gaming and Twitter. To a hard-bitten, fact-based news journalist neither should matter, but give me time and they will.

I was gripped by Jem Stone’s presentation on the day in the life of Radio 4 seen through Twitter. The wonderful connectivity displayed by the listeners, the creative use of Twitpix by Jonathan Ross.

Then Jem said something along the lines of how only 1% of listeners have even heard of Twitter, let along used it. And he said that SMS is still vastly more popular as a way of interacting with BBC Radio.

b.jpgBut it doesn’t matter because it is creative. Indeed, it may be that Twitter works better because it is a series of interconnected small networks with short messages. So expert Twittering journalist and Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru Murthy can appeal for question suggestions via Twitter without getting swamped by replies. If it gets any bigger then it becomes email.

And thanks to BBC Glasgow’s Sally Grieg for her interesting presentation on how they are partnering with Abertay University gaming design students. On my way to BBC White City I had been reading about how live gaming is a wonderful model of innovative online collaboration:

“To play a game like the team-based shooter Counter-Strike is to engage in a multi-layered system of collaboration. As a team-member each players must carefully co-ordinate strategy and in casual play all players are co-responsible for living up to a number of “local” norms; for instance that the practice of camping is not tolerated”

I don’t entirely understand the detail of that quote, but I do get the gist. Any media organisation with any pretension to creativity and connectivity has to understand these ways of networking. It is what the public is doing and so should we.

Now I know that this is not hot news to gaming/journalism experts like Phil Trippenbach (who ran today’s Beeb Camp so well) but how do we make it happen?

About the author

Charlie Beckett

Posted In: Research

4 Comments

Comments are closed.