Audiences keep it short and tweet

Originally published in Cue.

Social media and mobile devices are quickly becoming a permanent fixture in everyday life. We share every facet of ourselves with the world, including what we had for breakfast, who our friends are, and our likes and dislikes. This complete integration of the digital has the potential to change how we watch and engage with performances.

Comedian Siv Ngesi, who regularly uses his Twitter account to interact with his fans, is all for allowing the audience to tweet during his show. “A lot of comedy shows now have someone in the audience and someone backstage live-tweeting. I don’t mind at all if people tweet during my show.”

Twitter: A weapon of war?

Originally produced for The Oppidan Press.

Twitter was founded in March 2006 by American web developerJack Dorsey and seven years later and it has become one of the world’s most widely used forms of social media, boasting 500 million users, of which 200 million are considered active.

Twitter’s design enables the rapid sharing and consumption of information through text based messages called tweets that can contain up to 140 characters as well as images, video and links to other websites.

Owing to this unique, brief and hyper-fast feature, Twitter enables the broadcasting of information in real-time for consumption by anyone on the planet and so has been rapidly embraced by journalists and media organisations around the world as a method of reporting stories on the fly.