The obsession of the 'digital birdsong'
December 2011 by HR MediaBy Rebecca Ward
This week I’ve been lucky enough to gain some work experience with HR Media. As more and more people want to work in PR it’s a really great company to get some crucial work experience with.
It’s easy to see why a desire to work in PR is on the increase. PR can look beyond the textual confinements of newspapers, and has broken into a 24/7 paranoid world, where people check their smartphones before brushing their teeth on a morning.
You have to shout even louder to be noticed in the big wide world that is the World Wide Web. Therefore, PR is a crucial aspect to any company as the public image is something that can be scrutinized by anyone at any time.
Time magazine launched its ‘Top 10 of everything 2011’ list last week and for the first year ever it introduced a ‘Top 10 worst tweets’ category. Evidently Twitter has led to just as many downfalls as achievements this year.
The list gives the opportunity to tut and shake your head at thoughtless irrational people but perhaps Charlie Brooker has a point when he calls the ‘digital birdsong’ both a good and bad obsession of the public.
Brooker acknowledges the independent ability to find out our own news, to get news as it happens and become part of worldwide interesting debates. But he also notes how Twitter creates a playground of gossip and rumour declaring “The tabloids used to be adept at whipping the public into an infuriated frenzy: now we do it to ourselves”.
In our social networking world people need to be bigger and better than their competition to succeed, leading to embellished emotions and outrageous hatred towards mild acts of annoyance.
PR
is needed more than ever today to help manage these online environments. To
help make sure Twitter doesn’t turn into a shouting match,
subtlety, creativity
and consideration are good watch-words…and a way to avoid the unenviable ‘Top
ten worst tweets of 2012’.
