[CITASA] Media portrayls of Twitter, et al.

[Barry Wellman]

But Becky,

While I agree with your call for more attention paid to Internet politics,
I disagree with your saying that media portrayls have been positive.

I'm seeing mostly negative portrayls in the media of Twitter.  Both in
Canada and the US. Almost always written by journalists who don't know
anything about it -- they write as foreign correspondents -- and who
equate know-nothing punditry to hard-earned research.

 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
  Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
  University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
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 _______________________________________________________________________


> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2009 13:39:52 -0400
> From: "Prof. Becky Lentz" <becky.lentz at mcgill.ca>
> Subject: [CITASA] Seeking more balanced attention to 'internet'
> 	policies as	well as use
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As an addendum to (and agreement with) the positive portrayals of networked
> life (see recent posts re Twitter and Networked Life) focused on the power
> of the Internet paired with social networking technologies, I think it's
> equally important to be keep a focus on debates about the policies that make
> this infrastructure available, affordable, accessible, and democratic.
> Perhaps not all necessarily "traditional" sociology topics, but important to
> keeping another dimension of the conversation ever-present, especially from
> a sociological perspective. By this I mean the conversation about policies
> governing the Internet and communication infrastructure need not be driven
> primarily from political science: