While driving to the gas station on Saturday, I was listening to C-Span radio (90.1fm) as they discussed the upcoming Correspondents' Dinner with President Obama, that was to occur later that evening. For all who don't know, the dinner is held to, "raise money for scholarships and honor professional recipients for journalism awards." (Washington Post) As sad as it may sound, I have never really heard much about this dinner prior to this year. The radio program discussed how it was a particularly special event this year as it was the President Obama's first dinner. Several stars attended including comedian Wanda Sykes, Michael Steel, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Alicia Keys, and Kerry Washington, to name a few.
The program facilitator went on to interview another man about the large role twitter would play in the evenings events including the after-parties that would occur after the dinner. The attendees were set to tweet micro blogs of the nights happening to keep outsiders, interested fans, and those who will never experience the correspondents dinner themselves, updated and imagining they were there.
The talk of the use of twitter that night was with a positive tone, as if it were a really engaging and exciting component to the series of events. C-SPAN radio even posted its own twitter video links to Correspondent dinner videos and announced live video coverage of the dinner starting at 6pm for all who wanted to see. Huffington Post has also made itself available on twitter. Twitter-ers will label their tweets "#WHCA" or "#WHCD"
While I don't often give twitter is possibly due credit, I must admit that twitter has given people a new way to stay connected, to interact, and to share information, briefly and quickly.
I agree with a lot of the points you made (and I love C-Span radio too!!) Like Asher Epstein said in class, Twitter has amazing potential to share things immediately with the world, like a sale at J.Crew, but no one seems to have harnessed this potential yet. I'm hoping people start using Twitter for better purposes, because I think we'll all benefit. But if this never happens, I can maintain my self-righteous hate of Twitter.
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