Published since 2005. San Francisco is a city that belongs to the people of the world. Hence this blog has a global focus. The name "Sam Spade's San Francisco" refers to an exciting era in the City's history, the time of Dashiell Hammett's fictional gumshoe and San Francisco character, Sam Spade. My name is Tom Dunn and I edit the blog. I'm not as exciting as Sam Spade, but I am definitely a San Francisco character.Contact or on Twitter -- Search blog below.
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Monday, June 22, 2009
Twittering Journalism has Arrived!
Monday, June 22, 2009. This just in from : Until recently, a twitter was simply a bird making high-pitched mating calls. Now Twitter is in the vanguard of an army of cybernauts whose speedy steeds are propelling both democratic and authoritarian governments through a period of social change that is more profound than anything we have experienced through 5,000 years of recorded history.
, now almost three years old, has graduated from the banal to a geopolitical convulsion; it has already shaken Iran's regime of aging theocrats to its foundations. Limited to 140 characters per tweet, put down by detractors as cackle prattle, Twitter demonstrated it can mobilize hundreds of thousands for street demonstrations against a despotic regime.
A Boston Globe cartoon shows the turbaned, white-bearded supreme leader on his balcony ordering an acolyte to expel all the foreign correspondents reporting on the popular uprising in the streets below. But, responds the acolyte throwing up his arms, "they're all correspondents." In the street below, thousands of demonstrators turned instant journalists are firing their electronic weapons, twittering away the standards of foreign reporting, tweeting the future of journalism, and tweaking history. Online screams from men and women falling under the rubber truncheons were heard around the world.
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