Embracing Reality

I agree, NASA has grabbed hold of Twitter pretty well, and at least a few in the PAO know about Facebook. But the real force of NASA on Twitter is not Official NASA, but the people that work there, using personal accounts. These are the people who are bringing NASA to the rest of us.

I am not sure why anything that allows NASA to communicate all the cool stuff it does to the public for little to no cost should be approached with skepticism. Yeah, Twitter is not going to land us on Mars or do science, but it will help to educate the public on what goes on and hopefully increase support.

NASA lets its biggest potential P.R. vehicle - NASA TV, remain vastly underutilized. A public-private partnership on their channel seems a logical solution just as it is for launch services. Properly funded and programmed by a commercial venture, viewership of the channel would eclipse the audience currently reached by the social media initiatives. More importantly, it would expand public outreach beyond the NASA/space faithful that are probably the majority of current followers.

There are at least a few of us out in cyberspace that don't think 140 characters provide the essence of a story.

News crawls, headlines without content, twitter, and facebook 'walls' are convenient fast-food style writing for a generation of attention-deprived readers.

But they are anything but journalism. Such simplistic writing is often used for propaganda, but it rarely produces an informed public.

Based on a recent NYT article and brief comments in several other articles, social networking sites are seeing some users fade away; some say the medium gives a false sense of connection; others leave because of the protracted privacy problems.

Twitter works for dispatching taxi cabs and reporting the position of Japanese whaling vessels. The sheeple will eventually realize that it's not journalism and move on to the next flash in the pan.

I've encountered a lot of engineers at NASA who think they can do other people's jobs. I hope the young "publicists" at NASA that are pushing this social networking craze grow up into journalists before they watch NASA's public affairs presence scattered to the petabytes of trivia that make up social networks.

You do realize that these services allow you to post links right? I am not going to sign up for a NASA email newsletter because I get way to much email as it is and most of the time I am checking it on my phone where viewing such things is far from ideal.

However I am certainly a fan of a number of pages on facebook. I can see links to all kinds of updates, and by definition I am doing so when I am in a recreational mood. I don't use twitter much, but I know it works the same way. Its not really that much different from an RSS feed or other service that allows on to aggregate news in one places where they can decide if they want to view the larger amount of information on the other side of the link.

Certainly these things are not for everybody, but they are important tools that let organizations like NASA reach many more people then they could ever hope. Plus instead of relying on the press to accurately convey a story they can do it themselves.