It’s probably not hyperbole to say that digital photography has completely transformed our relationship with images. We are prodigious producers of visual imagery as much as we are voracious consumers of them. Today photos can be taken on a whim – no longer do we have to choose carefully what to photograph so we don’t run out of film. Nor do we have to wait to finish the roll and have the photos processed. Thanks to cameraphones, we pretty much have a camera handy at all times, and are able to share them online in an instant.
As a general rule, photography was not allowed in the special exhibitions at the American museums I visited (as opposed to the permanent galleries). The notable exception (which is where this was snapped) was at an Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. I would have thought IP and copyright (the standard rationale behind ‘no photographs’ rules) would have been a greater issue with game design than with most art exhibitions. Or perhaps this was a concession to the likely target audience of this exhibition? Make of it what you will . . .
The ubiquitous nature of photography has inevitably influenced museum visits and visitor behaviour. When I was in the US I noticed that most of the larger institutions permitted photography in most galleries, although there are still some seemingly arbitrary rules about this (as I have noted previously and in the image caption above).
Observing what visitors photograph is thus an expanding area of enquiry. It gives a different insight into what visitors think is interesting, important, or otherwise worth documenting about their visit (see Susan Cross’ blog post on holiday snappers). I know of at least one PhD project that is using visitor photography as a primary data source, and I’ve also heard of museums mining Flickr to see what pictures of their museum people are posting online.
People line up to photograph Dorothy’s red shoes from the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie at the Smithsonian Museum of American History.The Hope Diamond attracts the camera-toting crowds at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.Sometimes the camera can go where the eyes cannot – notice the person on the right holding their camera aloft to get a glimpse of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” through the crowds (at MoMA).
As well as noting what objects are the photographic ‘superstars’ in a museum, it’s also interesting to look at where (and how) people include themselves in the picture.
Two teenage girls take a ‘selfie’ at MoMA. As far as I can tell, they were posing in front of a window (presumably with an interesting view) rather than any specific object.At first I thought it was odd that this woman was listening to an audiotour with her back to the artwork . . . until I realised she was posing for a photo!People posing to be photographed next to the Moai at the American Museum of Natural History. I have since found out that the Moai was a character in the movie “Night at the Museum”. Whether the object’s popularity as a photo opp has changed as a result of this I can only speculate . . .
It seems that posing next to the objects is an important way for visitors to reaffirm to themselves and to others that yes, they were there.
A mother takes a photo of two very young children in front of the Egyptian tomb at the Met. They might be too young to remember this visit, but later they will be able to look back and see they were there. Will it help jog any early, formative memories in them I wonder?
Where it is permitted, photography clearly has a marked impact on visitor behaviour and the visitor experience. What are the implications? Does photographing the objects (and being photographed next to them) become more important than experiencing the object first hand? Do photographers get priority over non-photographers in getting unfettered visual access to objects? (Social norms dictate we get out of the way of a person lining up to take a photo in a way we don’t when someone is simply just looking.) What are the overall impacts and does it matter?
I borrow the title of this post from Francis Fukuyama, who famously (if rather prematurely) declared the “End of History” some 20 years ago. While I’m not going to make such bold proclamations here, I do want to be a little provocative and ask: has the heritage ‘industry’ planted the seeds of its own demise?
First a little background: at the Museums Australia conference a couple of weeks ago, several presentations reinforced the notion that heritage is both a process of preservationand of creation. However, it strikes me that the former is sometimes privileged at the expense of the latter. Indeed, we can become so preoccupied with preserving the cultural legacy of our forebears that we forget that we too have the opportunity (perhaps even duty) to create our own legacy as well.
One of the conference keynote speakers, Victor Steffenson (from Mulong Productions) spoke of his work using film-making to document Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. In a later panel discussion, he talked about how he wants to dispel assumptions that Indigenous culture is a static relic of the past. He described working with Aboriginal youth who said that they could no longer perform corroborees because their traditional dances had been lost. To which Victor’s reply was: “why not make new ones?” In other words, while preservation of traditional Indigenous culture is important (and an important part of Victor’s film work), it should not subsume the ongoing evolution of that culture as a creative process.
This got me thinking about the balance of preservation and creation in heritage more broadly. Look at any ancient city or old building and what you see is a palimpsest – the ongoing destruction, creation and restoration is what gives these sites their historical richness. However, this overwriting of one layer of history by another is often put to a stop in the name of ‘heritage’ – no more layers will be added to the palimpsest.
One of the first heritage sites I worked on was a Grade I listed building in Lincolnshire, which had been constructed in the latter part of the 14th century. Over the course of the building’s history it had served as the headquarters of a Hanseatic guild, a town hall, a court house, a council chamber and finally a local museum. A point about that last incarnation: over the years I’ve observed that ‘turn it into a museum’ is the fate of many heritage buildings – sometimes because it is a logical adaptive re-use, but too often because there is no other viable use for the building in its present state, and given its heritage listing it can’t be adapted for anything else, so ‘turning it into a museum’ becomes the default (and sometimes uncomfortable) compromise. But how many heritage buildings can realistically be preserved as museums?
From my (admittedly non-expert) perspective, it appears our shift to a focus on preservation is a consequence of events of the mid 20th century. In Europe, two world wars had wreacked destruction on an unprecedented scale. The reconstruction (and in Australia, post-war boom) of the 1950s and 1960s was then heavily influenced by the harsh, minimalist aesthetic of modernism. Modernism didn’t quite work out as planned: designs intended to make built spaces work like efficient machines ended up being hostile environments that invited crime. Furthermore, it didn’t age well, and many buildings from this era are reviled as eyesores. At some point, it seems we collectively proclaimed ‘never again’ to such follies and decided we had to be much more careful about using the bulldozer in future. This is not necessarily a bad thing. That is, unless preservation becomes paralysis.
I see this paralysis in action (if that’s not an oxymoron!) in my home town of Adelaide on a regular basis. In the Australian context, Adelaide is distinctive in that it was a planned settlement from the outset. The city plan as set out by chief surveyor Colonel William Light is considered one of our most significant cultural assets. And it is. However I get frustrated by those who seem to be more preoccupied by the letter, rather than the spirit, of Light’s plan. Light and his counterparts were progressives of their era; they were adapting new philosophies and approaches to urban planning and design. In contrast, new developments in 21st century Adelaide are often passionately resisted by preservation lobbies. Proposals frequently spend protracted periods in planning limbo (for as long as decades in some instances). Meanwhile, empty sites become dustbowls and heritage buildings lay empty as they cannot be adapted for contemporary use. This ‘heritage for heritage’s sake’ approach does not seem to serve anyone, and taken to its logical conclusion would turn the city into a museum of itself. And this is what I mean by the ‘end of heritage’. It is when the desire to preserve tips over to become the fear of creation.
I see signs of the pendulum swinging back, and perhaps a more pragmatic approach to adaptive re-use of heritage buildings (after all, their preservation is only sustainable if an economically-viable use for them can be found). There is also potential for a greater role for interpretation here too (but that’s a whole different subject).
Yes we should preserve and restore. But let’s not forget that we can adapt and create as well.
Everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001.
At the time I was living in the UK. I was working on a project in rural Lincolnshire and spent that afternoon in some long (and frankly rather tedious) meetings, oblivious to what was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic. At the end of the day, my colleague went to pick up our car from where we had parked it down the road. I waited on the narrow street with our clients, making small talk. It seemed to take an unusually long while for my colleague to show up – we were in an English market town and it was hardly rush hour – but eventually the car pulled up. He got out with a look of shock on his face. “Sorry – I was listening to the radio and missed the turning. Some planes have flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the towers have collapsed.”
We made the two hour journey home in near silence, listening to the news on BBC Radio as we let what had happened sink in. It was too soon to know whether our worst fears were irrational or a harbinger of what was to come. As we speculated as to what would happen next, and how the USA, a wounded military giant, would respond, I suddenly felt a long way away from home indeed.
Fast forward 11 years to today. Yes the world has changed, although perhaps not to the extent of my darkest fears that day. We have adjusted to the ‘new normal’ of heightened security with grim resignation. The ‘war on terror’ continues, but it has faded to the background of most people’s day to day lives. A new tower is reaching skywards above Ground Zero.
The Freedom Tower under construction
I imagine there has been much reflection, discussion and debate in the US about how to record and interpret such a significant historic event, particularly since it is such a painfully recent chapter. What objects should be preserved, how should they be interpreted – and who decides?
On my travels to the US I saw objects salvaged from the wreckage of the towers in several places, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the Newseum, the New York Public Library, and a visitor centre right near the current 9/11 memorial (the museum on the memorial site is not yet opened).
One of the memorial fountains, in the footprint of the former South Tower of the World Trade Center. The museum will eventually be located in the building to the left.
The 9/11 memorial site is open to the public and free, although for the moment you need a timed ticket to enter because the surrounding area is still a building site. In the footprint of each of the buildings are enormous fountains, surrounded by the names of those who perished in the towers (as well as the Pentagon, Flight 93, and the victims of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center). Rather than an alphabetical listing, people are grouped by flight crew or workplace. This juxtaposition of friends and colleagues, developed in consultation with next of kin and survivors, is a unique characteristic of the memorial.
For me, the most poignant part of the memorial site was the ‘survival tree’ – this tree was originally on the WTC site and miraculously survived the collapse of the adjacent buildings. It was removed, rehabilitated and now reinstated in the memorial site where it is gradually reestablishing itself. To me it was a symbol of continuity; the resilience of nature in the face of destructive forces unleashed by humanity.
The Survival Tree
In a museum setting, it’s a very different experience encountering objects from an event that you vividly remember, compared to something that’s safely abstracted in the past. As well as the twisted girders, plane parts and dust, there were displays that had a distinctly chilling edge:
Cell phones and pagers that kept ringing from the Ground Zero wreckage. (Display at the Newseum, Washington DC)
Another thing that sticks in my mind from this experience was the realisation that one person’s vivid memory is another one’s history. When I was in the 9/11 exhibition in the Newseum, there was a another woman about my age with a couple of children in tow. They would have been about 10 or 11 years of age. While I quietly pondered the wreckage on display, I overheard her explain to her children what we were looking at – that once there were these bad men in planes, they flew into buildings, the buildings collapsed, and so on. I was struck by the fact that there is now a generation that is (just about) old enough to understand what happened, but too young to remember. 9/11 is probably as remote a concept to them as the World War II air raids over Britain are to me.
And so it goes – soon enough I won’t be able to say that everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11, 2001.
With the London Olympics just around the corner, it seems like a good time to contemplate the cultural significance of sport in relation to the arts.
Think about the typical sections in an average newspaper, or an evening news bulletin – sport is usually second only to breaking news in terms of prominence. It’s seen as a perfectly natural and normal thing to foster an interest in. There seems to be an assumption that sport (primarily spectator sport) is for the ‘everyman’ – egalitarian and intellectually undemanding. By comparison, the arts (and sciences for that matter) are often cast as the exclusive domain of the intellectually minded and culturally initiated – the ‘elites’. But can we take it as axiomatic that a football game is inherently more accessible than a Van Gogh?
Sport is full of shared norms, assumptions and meanings that are by no means obvious to an outsider – the scoring structure of gymnastics and the offside rule in soccer are just two examples that spring immediately to mind. People who would never consider themselves “intellectual” will happily muse for hours about the strategy of a match or the merit of an umpire’s decision. Sporting choices are also laden with significance – our cultural identity, socio-economic status or ethnic background can all be reflected in the sports we follow.
In contrast, a work of art can have many of layers of meaning that would take an expert to deconstruct, but it can also be appreciated on the basis of pure aesthetics (as can sport). While there are certainly codes, norms and assumptions surrounding the arts, I would argue they are no more difficult to become conversant with than those associated with many sports. So why is one seen as inherently more accessible than the other?
It probably comes down to enculturation – I was raised in an AFL-loving family and Dad sitting me down and explaining the rules to me was just a natural part of growing up. Attending Saturday matches was a regular winter ritual. But visiting museums and art galleries was also part of my upbringing. So while I don’t always profess to ‘get’ art (or Dad’s forensic post-match analysis for that matter), I don’t find either inherently inaccessible either.
However it seems that “high” and “low” culture frequently regard each other with mutual suspicion. And does cut both ways – a friend of mine once told me how his theatrical colleagues were bemused by his love of Port Power, as to them it seemed to be an interest not worthy of a patron of the arts. While I don’t approve of his choice of team (Go Crows!), I’m siding with my friend on this one.
Having been to Perth and back since (with much food for thought from that trip), it seems like ages ago that I went to TEDxAdelaide (my preview post is here). But it was less than a fortnight ago (12th November to be precise).
The TEDxAdelaide team have done a speedy job of posting the talks online – see a list here.
If you want to get an overview of the day, try starting with the end – the wrapup poem by Tracy Korsten. While I’m not 100% sure how well it will translate to people who weren’t there, it was a witty and succinct summary of the day – and might give you a hint of which of the other talks might interest you.
My pick of the bunch is Why Things Hurt by Lorimer Moseley. Never has pain been so entertaining! And it was a brilliant example of science communication (I now see the neurobiology of pain in a completely different light). Loads of the other talks had science or technology themes, while scriptwriter Emily Steel got us thinking along the lines of – what is science anyway? What is the story behind the science?
Another one of my favourites was the talk by TACSI’sBrenton Caffin about the disconnect between the kafka-esque bureaucracy of many public services, and the often dedicated individuals who work in them.
I’m sure there are many other pithy observations I could make, but a lot of those would have been based on jottings I made on the day – in that notebook I lost in Perth. Oh well, you’ll just have to watch them for yourself!
In advance of tomorrow’s TEDxAdelaide 2011 (see this post on last year’s event) I thought I’d share a couple of TED talks that create an interesting juxtaposition. I enjoyed both and think they each contain some truth – but at the same time the ideas within them are somewhat at odds with each other.
This first one, by Malcolm Gladwell, is about how the key to happiness is a shift away from universals into embracing a diversity of interests and needs.
Gladwell maintains that we often can’t articulate what we like or what we want, and so it never occurs to us to ask for it when directly questioned by (for instance) market research. There is a great anecdote about how chunky pasta sauce went from being nonexistent (because no-one had thought to make it) to being an overnight success on supermarket shelves across America.
One consequence of the ideas in Gladwell’s talk is the proliferation of choice. Which, according to this talk by Barry Schwartz, is the exact recipe for making us unhappy.
Schwartz laments the seemingly infinite variety of products on our shelves, something that Gladwell (implicitly) celebrated. Too many choices means we expect ever higher standards from the choices we make. Reality increasingly falls short of expectations. Worse, we blame ourselves more because somewhere, somehow, the chance to make the correct choice was ours – and we blew it.
I think there is enough middle ground to accommodate both positions, but I thought considering the two arguments together (which I only happened to do by accident today) offered useful food for thought.
Photography is a spectator sport only in most galleries
The “No Photography” sign. It’s so ubiquitous that even when I don’t see a sign, I’m still wary that if I whip my camera out a stern-looking security guard will materialise to have words. ‘No photographs’ is still the default setting in many museums and most galleries, to the extent that when the ban is mostly absent, as it is in GoMA, it brings a markedly different complexion to the exhibition environment.
Not all exhibitions are so censorious of photographic activity – indeed, in one of the first exhibitions I worked on, at the National Space Centre in Leicester, some exhibits were deliberately planned to work as photo opportunities. Generally speaking, hands-on exhibitions and venues that target families seem to welcome photography as an important way for their visitors to record, share and recollect experiences.
A quick tot-up of my ‘Exhibit Photos’ file folder revealed some 3000 images of exhibits and exhibitions, in approximately 20 cities around the world, all taken since I first bought a digital camera back in 2003. For me, this is a valuable repository of all the places I’ve visited; the good, bad and ugly of exhibit ideas; and a way to remember far more than if I’d travelled with just my eyes, ears and unaided memory. Just looking at the pictures brings back the experiences, and I remember far more about what I did, how I felt and what I learned at all the exhibitions I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited. Without these images, most of these experiences would have been lost in the blurry mists of time.
Admittedly, the purpose of my photographic jaunts was primarily professional (and the emphasis of each batch of photos is an inadvertent record of whatever particular kind of exhibition I happened to be researching at the time – it inevitably influenced what was ‘photo-worthy’). Even so, compact digital cameras (and more recently smartphones) have transformed photography from a way of documenting holidays and special occasions to the way we increasingly document and share our day-to-day lives. We see, therefore we photograph. We photograph, therefore we share. These actions help to reinforce our memories and add value to our experiences. But have museums recognised this cultural shift? And are they doing anything to accommodate it?
The photography ban is based on some sound reasoning. However, I want to deconstruct some of this reasoning to see if it still holds in the 21st century, or whether museums and galleries are simply sticking to historical habit to the detriment of the visitor experience:
Conservation reasons: Light damages delicate objects like paper and textiles. Their ideal environment from a conservation perspective is complete darkness, so having sensitive objects on public display at all is always a matter of compromise at some level. So banning flash photography makes sense. Non-flash photography may be impractical (although not damaging) as the objects are often displayed in low-light environments. However, while it depends on the objects of course, I wonder if the ‘no flash’ rule is applied more liberally than it needs to be, given that modern camera flashes are nowhere near as UV-intensive as the old-fashioned ones that the rules were presumably designed for?
Pointless or disruptive photography: in these circumstances, banning photography makes perfect sense. Other people snapping and flashing away (in the photographic sense) can inhibit the experience of other visitors, particularly during shows or theatrical presentations. One person’s right to document their day shouldn’t trump the rights of other visitors to enjoy the experience in peace if they so wish. Live animals displays are also an inappropriate subject for flash photography. A final note in this regard, I always have to have a bit of a giggle to myself when I see people attempt to take a flash-photograph of a projection. Do they really not realise that all they are capturing is a blank screen?
Copyright reasons: this is the big one. And by far the knottiest. It sounds serious, but at the same time is sufficiently vague that it can seemingly be used as a convenient excuse to point to in order to stick to the comfort zone of the status quo. This is a cynical interpretation, to be sure, but visitors are seldom given any evidence to counter such cynicism. Sometimes it seems as if copyright is too complicated to figure out; that it’s easier for museum and gallery management to just lump everything together into the intellectual property equivalent of the maximum security wing. Looking at society more broadly, the copyright genie is well and truly out of the bottle – attempts to bring it back under old business models seem doomed to failure (the recording industry and rights management is a salutary tale here). In any case, I find it hard to understand how a few iPhone snaps in a gallery pose a serious copyright threat to anyone: people will still want to buy properly produced prints and postcards of the items they really like, and how can the extra publicity generated by the sharing of photos be a bad thing for artists’ careers?
I’m not saying that photography should be a free-for-all by any means. But I think the default should be for museums and galleries to allow photography unless there is a good reason not to (rather than the ban being the norm). Rules with clear reasons (i.e. signs which explain why photography or flash are not permitted in certain areas) are more likely to be respected than blanket bans which appear to treat the public with suspicion.
Some people, because they do not value photography themselves, may not consider it an issue. Going further, some may even consider taking snaps too vulgar or somehow not reverent enough for the gallery environment. But then again, the ‘establishment’ has been complaining about the poor behaviour of ‘the uneducated masses’ in museums for as long as public museums have been in existence. And if photography is done respectfully of objects, their creators and other visitors, where is the harm?
It’s called “Sweat the small stuff”, and describes how large corporations are often disconnected with what actually happens on the ground. Business leaders expect the world to behave like Newtonian physics: the level of effort should be in direct relation to the size of the outputs.
However, human behaviour doesn’t work like physics: what changes our attitudes and behaviour is not necessarily proportional to the level of complication, expense or force exerted. Small things can be surprisingly memorable. Simple changes can have remarkable impacts.
Conversely, in large projects everyone can get so wrapped up in the big picture, the strategy, that they fail to get the details right. So ‘big stuff’ (e.g. new buildings) can be done spectacularly well, while the ‘small stuff’ (e.g. signage) is the poor cousin that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But – it’s the the small stuff that can very easily get in the way of the big thing’s success.
Because of this, Sutherland calls for all organisations to have a Chief Detail Officer, as well as a Government Ministry of Detail. Rather than people in charge of the purse strings (who are instinctively drawn to big and complicated solutions), such Details people would be charged with keeping a look out for the deceptively simple – in some cases this might just be seeing what’s fallen through the cracks between one big initiative and the next.
Details are the foundations. Get them wrong and that’s what people will notice first.
Or . . . how a techie novice came to embrace social media.
Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve learned until you come across someone who is yet to embark on that particular learning curve.
I came to realise this recently when I started to talk about Twitter at a conference, only to be met with a lot of blank looks. Almost by accident I have become a citizen of the Twitterverse, and it is only when I encounter non-tweeters that I realise how much I’ve learned about social media over the past few months.
First some background about my relationship with ‘technology’ – I’m not an early adopter. I’ve long believed that there are two main types of people when it comes to attitudes to technology:
“What does it do?”types – these are the people who are turned on by technology in and of itself. They like experimenting with new gadgets and technology. They like the functionality, and play with it to discover applicability.
“What does it do for ME?”types – these people aren’t necessarily anti-technology, but they’re more cautious. They don’t particularly like playing with gadgetry. But when they find an application that fits with their day-to-day lives, they’ll embrace it with both arms._
(Yes OK there is a third type, those who are inherently suspicious of technology in all its forms and wish it would go away. If you are in this category you won’t be reading this post anyway because that would mean switching on a computer.)
I fit into the second category: I’m not all that confident with gadgetry and have never felt particularly web-savvy (although I’m starting to realise I probably know more than I think I do – osmosis is a powerful learning tool).
As a Type #2 person, I had adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ attitude to Social Media. I joined Facebook and LinkedIn in 2007, and this was in response to specific needs that presented themselves at the time. It was not long after I moved back to Australia from overseas, and these sites were a handy way of keeping in touch with friends from the UK and make new business contacts respectively. And I’ve been a reasonably regular user of each since. But I think Facebook is more of a tool for sharing with people you know rather than for meeting new people, and LinkedIn is quite focused in its remit and tends to be a more formal networking space.
By comparison, Twitter is far more powerful and versatile as a communication and networking tool. I opened a Twitter account out of curiosity in late 2009 but it sat more or less dormant until the middle of this year, which was when I embraced the Twitterverse.
So what were the catalysts for this change, at least in my circumstances?
Change of work situation: in the middle of this year I left full time work and started working from home. This gave me a desire to connect with people so I didn’t feel isolated; it also gave me time & space to get to grips with how Twitter works and how it could work for me (not that leaving your job is necessary to get your head around Twitter!)
Programs like TweetDeck and Echofon: I never really figured out how to incorporate the Twitter website into the texture of my daily life, and have only just recently taken the plunge to buy a smartphone (as a Type #2 person, I’ve been getting by on my partner’s hand-me-down phones for the past decade). I found that TweetDeck was easily customisable, incorporated Facebook and LinkedIn into a kind of one-stop-shop, and could happily run in the background on my desktop. Meanwhile Echofon was a handy application for using on my iPod touchto follow live Twitter feeds in front of the telly. Being able to do this gave me a feel for how the medium worked. (An aside: I only have an iPod Touch because Dad was given one as a freebie. It took me ages to figure out what the point of it was, but it is now is my near-constant companion – typical Type #2 behaviour!)
Finding stimulating people to follow: I’d heard all the hype about Twitter being all about celebrity banalities and people broadcasting what they had for breakfast. I didn’t think it was necessarily a place where grown-ups congregated to discuss things of significance. But I knew a few fellow science communicators had been tweeting for a while, plus I’d become aware of a couple of museum professionals with an interest in social media. So following these people seemed like a good place to start. Then, by following the #qanda hashtag during ABC TV’s Q&A and also the #auspol discussion during the lead-up to the Australian Federal Election, I also found more interesting people to follow. Plus there is a lively Twitter community in Adelaide and it wasn’t long before I found them and / or they found me.
Getting over ‘stagefright’: I’m a fairly extroverted person, but I feared an off-the-cuff statement being preserved for all eternity in the virtual sphere. What if I couldn’t think of anything profound to say in 140 characters or less? What if I say something that comes across as stupid and it comes back to haunt me? I must say I’m still *relatively* careful about what I say in a tweet. But I now see that in the general scheme of things, my tweets are but grains of sand on a virtual beach – most people will only be half paying attention (at best) to anything I say unless I really go to town. Small sins are readily forgiven.
Encountering a real community in the virtual sphere: through Twitter, I have participated in lively debates and discussions, shared links and valuable information, expanded my business networks, live-tweeted from conferences, kept up with breaking news and found out about forthcoming events happening in the Real World. (e.g. TEDxAdelaide had a strong Twitter presence before, during and after the day itself). I’ve even been to the movies and a picnic organised by #socadl. (Adelaideans in social media.) In short, I’ve made friends, broadened my professional network and come to know people I never would have encountered if I hadn’t taken the plunge into Twitter.
So my advice to the reluctant would be: give it a go! Terminology like handles and hashtags might seem a bit alien at first, but a bit of trial and error goes a long way. And it’s a great opportunity to feel part of a community of ongoing conversation.
