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These nine statements were the basis of my presentation at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference this afternoon. (And yes, they’re all 140 characters or less.)
1. IT’S EASY. It’s simple to join Twitter, and simple to post. You can do it at the spur of the moment.
2. IT’S IMMEDIATE. Readers will see what you write in minutes. If you’re making news, Twitter gets your news out NOW.
3. IT’S OPEN. Anyone interested in what you’re doing can find you, and you can find people talking about the same stuff.
4. IT’S CONNECTED. Twitter encourages conversation and builds relationships. It lets you make contacts outside your circle.
5. IT’S FLEXIBLE. Twitter lets you integrate media. You can post photos, video, links, blog content, use it as message board, chatroom.
6. IT’S CONCISE. 140 characters forces you to speak clearly and forcefully to an open-ended audience.
7. IT’S CUMULATIVE. Twitter followers tend to be “sticky,” so connections accumulate without intensive effort.
8. IT’S SUSTAINABLE. Blogging can be a chore, but since you don’t need to maintain by regular posting, Twitter isn’t an energy suck.
9. IT’S NEW. Nobody knows for sure where it’s going, and lots of folks are eager to find out. That’s an opening, in all sorts of ways.
A reminder: My panel at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference is tomorrow at 2:45 pm at Hunter College.
Here’s the panel description:
Student activists are constantly struggling to build community, and new media offer powerful tools for making that happen. Our workshop will explore the role of activist-produced media in creating news, transforming existing narratives, and empowering students in the university and the larger society. The panel will consider the role of alternative and mainstream media in recent organizing at CUNY, NYU and the New School, examine how activists can make effective use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools, and illuminate how educators can bring activist-produced video into the classroom.
Our lineup is going to include folks talking about the use of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in student organizing, and our presenters are a mix of undergrads, grad students, and others. It’s going to be a great session, and if you make it out, be sure to come say hi afterwards.
The whole conference is looking great, and it’s ridiculously cheap, so if you’re going to be in NYC tomorrow and you’re not already booked, you should be sure to stop by.
Saturday morning update: Conference tweeting is at the #nycgm hashtag. A photo of me is up here, if you’d like to say hi.
On CNN yesterday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo said that the National Council of La Raza, the Latino civil rights organization of which Judge Sonia Sotomayor is a member, is “a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses.” His evidence?
The logo of La Raza is ‘All for the race. Nothing for the rest.’
One big problem with that. The motto of the National Council of La Raza is “Strengthening America by promoting the advancement of Latino families.” (Their logo, if anyone’s wondering, can be seen in this photo of John McCain’s speech to their 2008 national convention.)
Oops.
The phrase Tancredo had in mind, “Por La Raza todo, fuera de La Raza nada,” appears in a 1969 poem/manifesto associated with the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano student activist group.
MEChA is a loose federation of campus-based student organizations, some more radical than others. California politician Cruz Bustamente was a MEChA member as an undergraduate at Fresno State University in the 1970s, and he got in hot water with conservatives during his 2003 campaign for governor for refusing to repudiate the group.
MEChA and NCLR could hardly be more different.
I’ve just returned from my doctoral commencement ceremony. Posting will resume tomorrow.
In a 2002 interview Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that she felt “isolated … and very unsure about how I would survive” as an undergraduate at Princeton, and that campus organizations for students of color “provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world.”
Sotomayor grew up poor in the Bronx, and she discovered in her first semester at Princeton that her educational background “was not on par with that of many of my classmates.” She became involved in Accion Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican student organization, and the campus’s Third World Center, and she credits “the third-world students who preceded me and those who had supported me while I was at Princeton” for helping her to thrive on campus.
The complete article, from Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education, is not online, but extended excerpts can be found here.
studentactivism.net 
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