[Air-L] "Hack the Debate" - Twitter and CurrentTV join together

Tuszynski, Stephanie stuszyns at bethanywv.edu
Mon Oct 6 08:11:19 PDT 2008


Some of you may already be aware of this.

For all the debates in the US presidential election this month, CurrentTV (the network founded by former Vice President Al Gore) has collaborated with Twitter.com to run a program called "Hack the Debate." Essentially what happens is CurrentTV selects messages being posted to their Twitter channel/page and runs those messages on the bottom of the tv screen during the debates.

It's a little like Pop Up Video for politics, for those who remember that show. 

Current and Twitter are both promoting this as being the first time this has ever been done, running live "tweets" over a tv broadcast. I'm sure it's the first time it's been done with Twitter, but running text messages over a tv broadcast has been done before, I'm pretty sure. 

I've participated in both of these so far. There's a severe lag between what's posted to Twitter and what appears on the television screen, leading to some unintended humor and of course the majority of the actual messages on Twitter don't appear on the television screen (the network is also filtering out profanity, etc.). At first there wasn't much interaction between people posting on the Twitter channel but during the VP debate you started to see more messages being aimed at other people posting, so who knows what will happen during these last 2 debates.

http://current.com/topics/88834922_hack_the_debate

PS - See some of you in Austin this week, I hope!

Dr. Stephanie Tuszynski
Assistant Professor of Communication
Bethany College






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