The bullets had scarcely stopped flying in Paris before the pressure was on. There were the profile pictures filtered with le Tricolore or changed to show the user on holiday in Paris; the memes with cartoons by Charlie Hebdo illustrator Joann Sfar or words by Martin Luther King Jr; the condemnations of religious fundamentalism and pleas for tolerance on behalf of the peaceful majority of the world’s Muslims. The counter narrative went hand-in-hand: what about Beirut, we were asked with varying degrees of sanctimoniousness, where Islamic State militants had killed 41 people the day before the Paris attacks?

Interactivity is considered one of the defining features of the online experience, yet the reality of most media consumers today is one defined by interpassivity. And it presents a serious challenge for those of us engaged in online journalism.

I’ve long harboured what’s now an unfashionable affection for the politician, diarist and columnist formally known as The Real Mark Latham. His politics are incoherent and the few hundred words he had in the Financial Review hardly gave him the scope needed to address this. Naively, I thought an hour-long ‘conversation’ with Jonathan Green at the Melbourne Writers Festival might illuminate how such an intelligent man deals with these seemingly irreconcilable inconsistencies. Instead, the audience got Latham Unfiltered.

There are a lot of things I don’t get about Twitter and/or Facebook: hashtags (seriously, who uses them?), profile photos, how righteous a tweet can make us feel even as it fills us with self-doubt. There’s no tone and little room for nuance or context in these spaces, no grace for momentary lapses or mistakes, and outrages frequently ensue.

Recently, someone of substantial literary clout asked me a question I have been dreading for some time: ‘Can we expect to hear more from you on Twitter? It can be very useful for writers.’ Oh dear. I’d been sprung. I had to admit that I don’t really get what Twitter is for if one is […]

I swore I’d never sign up to Twitter. ‘What’s the point?’ I’d ask. ‘It’s just status updates like Facebook.’ In June 2009 I found myself deciding what my Twitter username would be. What bought about this change in attitude? Well, Grods, if you must know. Scott made the announcement that Bron had signed up. She […]

Facebook is all the people you go to school with. Twitter is all the people you wish you went to school with. So said some incisive, possibly adolescent, tweeter last week. I joined Twitter last July and, as of this morning, have 1165 tweets. Is that a lot? Almost certainly, yes, but I think the […]