Ytaelena's Weblog
I love to use my traditional "watchdog" instincts to serve communities. But also I have a deep desire to help them develop the power of social networks on the internet.Archivos para mayo, 2008
Twitter in Spanish:
Building social networks in Spanish in U.S.
By Ytaelena Lopez
Posted May 15, 2008 in Maynard Institute blog’s.
(Links available in the original article)
Recently I attended the conference NewsTools2008, in Sunnyvale,
California. The central theme of the conference was the interaction between
journalism and technology, what they call there (in Silicon Valley) a
‘mashup’ concept. What is the goal? To revitalize the old job of making
news.
To accomplish this we must understand how people consume information
online. At least this is one of the proposal of Icities Congress, held in
Spain from 9 to May 11. Hispanics living in the United States United States
have been the first to join this trend, as discussed some time ago by Pamela
Parker in ClickZ.
But apparently much of the journalists who write in Spanish have not
realized the online dimension as a public space, yet. I was able to
observe this personally. I could ‘twitter” NewsTools2008 in Spanish, thanks to
support from the people of Media Giraffe and the Maynard Institute. However,
it was a bucket of cold water to note that I was the only one.
How many of my readers have accounts on Twitter or at least know what I am
talking about?
Many of my Spanish readers can refute me and place as an example
Reportwitters networks (in English) among many others. Okay, granted.
Changing the question then. How many of you, journalists living in the
United States and are able to work in Spanish, know what I am talking about?
We could define Twitter as a social network where microbloggers post their
notes in no more than 140 characters. The format allows for the possibility
of placing news and respond in real time from any cell or instant messaging
service, enriched by the instant response of many interlocutors.
For me this is like “truly gonzo” journalism , unedited, as Hunter S.
Thompson dreamed it when he wrote his book ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’.
We can build a network of journalists and citizens that generates lively news
or links, as the endless conversations of @UCAMMediaLab or the ‘spiderweb’
woven in @Periodistas.
It is understandable that the Baby Boomers (people between 40 and 60 years)
may not find understand opening an account on Twitter. They only
represent 19 percent of the content in social networks, according to
Business Week magazine. Their legacy is found mainly in traditional media like
television, radio or print, all currently in crisis. It was only in 1990 when
CERN in Geneva gave birth to WorldWideWeb (www) and the first Web server.
I recognize also that young people between 18 and 27 years, the so-called
Generation Y, have a natural advantage compared to others: they grew up with
video games and learned to handle the Internet when they were children. For
this reason the future of New Media rightfully belongs to them: more than
half of them have an account on Facebook, Hi5 or any other social network.
More than a third generate content for themselves.
Perhaps a good example in English might be journalists @Digidave, @Kaliya or
@Kara. In Spanish I would not miss Luis Carlos Diaz, aka @LuisCarlos, who at just 23 years revamped the South American blogosphere and
participates in congresses of citizen journalism.
The problem is Generation X, immortalized in a book Douglas Coupland’s book,
that began playing marbles and ended with Atari controls. Of
this group of people whose ages range between 27 and 40 years, only third
‘plays’ in social networks, according to the same statistics of the magazine
Business Week.
Find out who was the only person who “twitters” in Spanish within the group
of lecturers in NewsTools made me feel really member of a minority. The live
coverage made on this important event was exploited by people from other
countries, with some exceptions. Some of my
colleagues who work in digital media in Spanish even asked me how to open an
account on Twitter. A a sponsor of the event, the @NAHJ (National
Association of Hispanic Journalists) just have one update on Twitter since
June 14, 2007.
I searched in Twitter and I could not find a single network devoted to
journalism in Spanish in the US like
@Journalists in Latin America, @Tuitiar in Argentina, or @to2blog in
Venezuela. Much less a social network of citizens journalists’ as @Bottup.
Unfortunately, as Jose Zamora (Knight Foundation) said, the digital gap
between Latin America and United States is getting bigger. The consequences become
obvious among Spanish-language media in United States. The 92 percent of
journalists working in them are foreigners and more than half are older than
30 years, according to the NAHJ. Who can think of technological toys where
poverty is part of the context?
In the nineties, the laptops were a luxury reserved for the wealthiest
people in Venezuela. I still remember the smell of Tipp-Ex (correction
fluid) that I used on my first typewritten college essay. Now
things are very different, but still the Internet remains a luxury in rural
areas.
Ironically, poor countries like Cuba, Bolivia and Peru have made exemplary
use of the news media to weave nets of citizen journalism. The Cuban Yoani
Sanchez, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to
Time magazine and winner of the Ortega y Gasset Prize for her blog
“Generation Y” is a good example. There are also others such as the Peruvian
Marcos Sifuentes with his UteroTV, aka @Uterotv for Twitter, or the
Bolivian Sebastian Molina inventor of MundoAlreves, aka @Yopuej. There are
a lot of examples in the increasingly mis-named “Third World”.
Why not do something similar to them here in United States, where the income
per capita is higher and access to technology is much easier? Do Latinos
(or Hispanics) who like to read in their own language deserve a
project with the quality of NLA / Citizen Journalism in Latin America?
I have some answers, but I prefer to leave it to the next column.
En vivo desde IJ-5, innovación en periodismo, Stanford
Check the simultaneous translation (English-Spanish) of this conference in my another blog Tappingyta
