Haiku Gonzo Journalism - the art of the social media update

I just had a conversation with my friend Signe Wenneberg about what characterizes an interesting Facebook update/tweet as opposed to the utterly irrelevant, boring and useless update.

We all know the situation, of course. You are scanning through your friend updates – be it on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. Some updates make you laugh, others make you think, others again make you act, and finally some make you think: “Why the f… did you have to waste 1,7 second of my life posting this irrelevant, ego centered, stupid garbage!”.

People who do not understand the dynamics of social media, of course, think that all the content of Facebook and the like is irrelevant, ego centered, stupid garbage. But the fact is that Facebook, Twitter and other “profile-based” social media actually serve as perfect social filters for information. Personally, I get most of my information about cultural events and a large part of professional news from the status updates and tweets of my “friends” on social networks. By spending approximately 30 minutes on Facebook every day I get a convenient overview of what is happening in my professional area, and what kind of cultural events I should absolutely not miss in my geographical vicinity.

And I get all of this information, because I have friends who write interesting updates – in other words very short little sentences, which have the author as the starting point, but communicate a piece of information which is potentially relevant for other people.

In other words, the interesting social media update could be described as a kind of Haiku Gonzo Journalism. And seen in that perspective we have all become – or are becoming – Haiku Gonzo Journalists.

So what is a Haiku Gonzo Journalism?

Well basically it is all about being able to tell an interesting and relevant story by using yourself as the starting point – very often using humor or quirky statements to accentuate your point or attract the attention of your reader. This is of course extremely difficult, and what makes it even more difficult is that you need to operate in the playing field of 140 characters plus the ability to add links or embed further information or media.

Just as in traditional journalism, there is unfortunately quite far between the really clever Haiku Gonzo Journalists in the social media space. We are all still untrained in the art of Haiku Gonzo Journalism, but I think that as people get more used to Social Media communication they will both become more skilled Haiku Gonzo Journalists, and they will learn how to filter away the people who do not understand the subtleties of communicating in the social media space.