One of the most exciting aspects of social media is how it democratises news and information – everybody has a chance to report what is happening where they are in real time, possibly making it more ‘authentic’. Do tools like Twitter make the reporting more ‘real’? Does the absence of the editorial agenda attached to a newspaper or TV channel make it more transparent? For example, the TV and newspaper footage of the Hudson river plane crash was great and everything, but Twitter was the one that really came into its own. Traditional media have more skills and equipment to draw on, but for practical reasons they just can’t match Twitter in terms of immediacy. This was something picked up on by The Guardian and the LA Times (check out the photo):

The major media outlets in New York responded quickly and on the whole they did a good job of reporting the news of the so-called “miracle on the Hudson”.

By contrast, news was all over microblogging website Twitter within minutes. One of the early reports came from New Yorker Janis Krum who wrote: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” Krum also uploaded this pic of the plane floating in the river. Krum was interviewed by MSNBC later yesterday and his pic had more than 100,000 views on TwitPic by this morning.

Yet the most immediate and compelling reports and images came from citizens. Even if you had the most rapid response system in the world, reporters were not able to teleport themselves to the scene – not to mention the fact that the on-the-ground location changed as the plane floated downstream.

If you go to Twitpic, you’ll see that the photo had 354129 views to date. Impressive.

Going back to Obama, this very same feature of social media offers the potential to bring greater transparency to politics and government. Note that within 1 minute of President Obama’s inauguration a new blog was set up on the White House website.  Go to our very own Number10.gov.uk, and look at how they’ve really pimped up their site with Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. Perhaps, in the post-inauguration euphoria, we can dare to dream that these tools will be utilised to the fullest, and that this ‘reaching out’ to the public will genuinely lead to greater transparency and public engagement in news and politics.

In Obama’s victory speech he said that the unsung heroes are his campaign managers and his strategist. Just look at how they tapped into communication tools that no candidate has ever bothered with before, such as Facebook right from the early days of the campaign, to creating his very own online community at MyBarackObama, to the point where Obama’s internet following was a self-driven vehicle.

For example, Obama (or one of Obama’s assistants) was tweeting on Twitter, with no less than 119,730 followers. Everytime he was speaking at a rally, a little link would be posted to allow his followers to watch it in realtime. By engaging with new forms of media, Obama has succeeded in reaching out to a new generation of voters, showing that he is a man of the world, for the world. He realises the amazing potential of social media and is able to use it as a means of getting his message across and cultivate a grassroots following through it.

For those of us who were unable to vote, how amazing it was to live through an historic event like this and, thanks to the internet and social media, to be able to feel like you’re really part of it. No matter who you supported in the campaign, after Obama’s victory, we must all agree that the internet’s ability to unite people and allow them to share experiences and interact should not be underestimated. Just look at some of reactions of people around the world, which we are now able to see for ourselves.

This article in the pioneering Huffington Post discusses how in this election the internet has done more than supplement traditional media:

While discussing with a friend an election night viewing party he’s throwing, he announced there would be “televisions all over the place.” “That’s great,” I said, “but just make sure the WiFi is working.” Because this year, the laptop — along with the array of Internet-connected mobile devices — has replaced the television as the must-have election night device.

P.S. While we’re on the subject, the blogosphere is currently alive with Obama-inspired posts, even suggesting that as freelancers we can learn from the campaign in terms of how we present ourselves, such as this one over at Contract Worker.

True enough, there are many examples of poor grammar and spelling around, enough for many eagle-eyed writers to write entire books about them. I enjoy spotting these mistakes and chuckling about them as much as the next person; I am a massive fan of Lynne Truss and have read and re-read her books like old friends, and I applaud anyone who heightens awareness of language and grammar amongst the general public. As Truss demonstrates in the title of her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a wrongly placed comma can completely mislead a reader. This is amusing for native speakers, but a major comprehension problem for a non-native reader of English, and it is of course something translators must always be careful to avoid.

However, there is a difference between the language we use in official publications and translations, and the language we use to communicate via instant, informal methods such as text messages, social networking sites and emails. Think about it: in speaking on the phone to friends and relatives, only the proudest people would claim to be able to hold conversations free from mistakes in word order, use of the possessive, tense etc., every single time they pick up the phone.  We must all accept that we are human, that instant communication methods require us to think on our feet; our brains simply don’t have time to focus on the message of what we’re saying and the grammar within it. We have moved far beyond the era of telegrams and communicating solely by posted letter and we have adapted accordingly, as humans are so adept at doing.

Whilst in spoken language we have recourse to intonation, volume and tone, to ensure the clarity of our message in place of grammar, you might argue that is what we’re attempting to do in emails and text messages as well. We use emoticons, capital letters, italics, amongst other tools, to try to express what it is we’re saying when we don’t have a lot of time in which to do it. I happen to think that this is not a bad thing; we are unable to claw back much time these days, we’re all terribly busy, that’s a given, so we are adapting to that with time-saving methods.

My favourite linguist, David Crystal, recently wrote a fascinating article for The Guardian on text speak, in which he argues that it actually represents a highly creative use of an evolving language. Moreover, he makes the important point that writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, DH Lawrence all used ‘deviant’ spelling in their novels, so it’s not something entirely new. A bit of trivia for you: ‘cos’ was first entered into the Oxford English Dictionary in 1828, and ‘wot’ in 1829.

Doom-mongers will be horrified to learn that there is now even a ‘text laureate’, but perhaps surprised that last year’s winner was in fact in her late 60s.