I feel pretty guilty for still being meh on Google+. I was super psyched when I got my invite, but have since found myself unable to figure out what to do with it. The thing is, I’m still trying to figure out its purpose for a lot of different people (especially myself). Its release framed it as sharing done right—making sharing easier, and making the way we share more specific and purposive. I’ve always been interested in how people are circulating (political) information in a digital environment (and in the very fact that they are told to share info, and what that means for how information flows through a public), so this is really interesting to me. In promoting the concept of sharing to such a degree, G+ seems to be saying that proper online engagement fundamentally involves this process of sharing and passing along information–good online citizenship isn’t just consuming information, but sharing it / forwarding it on to others as well.

While this seems really cool, it may have problems.

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So, I was going to write about Obama’s Twitter Town Hall…but it was, by most accounts, pretty boring. So, lets talk about why it was a bust. There seem to be two easy (and likely partially/largely spot-on) answers:

1. Obama wasn’t tweeting (and the answers were therefore just Obama’s usual talking points).

We know the president gives long answers in which the logic/argument progresses, is well-explained, and attempts a nuance that is likely not amenable to Twitter. So, why are people surprised he didn’t tweet, or that he was verbose? I think a much more interesting question than “why’d this flop” actually concerns these expectations: Can “interaction” really work across different media platforms? Phrased differently, can we ask questions on Twitter and be happy with a response that’s made for face to face (or straight-to-camera)? Continue reading →