This piece on Richard Dawkins caught my eye this week because I figured it would be a good piece that incorporates social media with analytical writing. I anticipated embedded tweets, responses to his tweets, and the like — but none of that appeared.
My initial reaction was that maybe it's the site's style policy to avoid embedding tweets, but I've certainly seen pieces on Slate before with embedded tweets, such as this analysis a few weeks ago of people's tendency to tweet in memory of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
So why did they not include the tweets directly embedded in the story, as opposed to linking them? I think the piece could have been much more efficient that way. Slate doesn't get any advertising money (as far as I'm aware) by linking back to Twitter, and I'd be surprised if people actually want to click on tweets to see the full context of them. I think it complicates the piece by forcing readers to physically exert effort into looking at the tweets referenced.
I think it could have also made the piece less dry to read if it had the physical boxes of embedded tweets breaking up the story. The piece isn't overly long as a whole, but some of the paragraphs are a bit long, so it would be nice if it was broken up a bit.
Also, I think it would be nice to have the visual context of the numbers of retweets and favorites Dawkins' tweets were getting, just for the sake of adding another dimension as to how popular these (arguably outrageous) tweets are.
No comments:
Post a Comment