Tweeting the NSOTU

Photo courtesy of -nathan via Flickr and Creative Commons

Some anecdotal observations from "watching" Obama's address to the nation this evening.

I'm not new to a multimedia, multi-platformed, swithtasking approach to watching major moments in political television. I gathered friends over for nearly every last debate (back when no one really knew a lot about Mike Gravel other than the fact that he had one of the oddest and most humorous online videos in presidential candidate history) and dealt with the span of their reactions to my insistance that I have a laptop in front of me and a Twitter feed ticking by.

Back then, barely a year ago, I found it difficult to keep up. I would be reading a Tweet, trying to listen to a friend's comment, and pay attention to what the candidates were actually saying all at the same time. Maybe it was just being a late adopter, but it was hard to keep up.

Tonight however it was like second nature. I saw a post come up in my Twitter aggregator (TwitterFox -- which throws it into a manageable add-on for my Firefox browser) with a simple tag: #NSOTU. It took me less than a full second to realize that was the tag for tonight's speech (read: Not State of the Union). Before President Obama was even a few minutes into the speech, someone posted a link to the full text of his speech. So in addition to listening to the commentary of the people in the room, reading the Tweets, paying attention to the visual images on my television and listening to Obama speak, I was reading along.

It was hard to keep up, with about 50 new posts per minute requesting my browser to refresh itself. A lot of the comments made it feel like I was sitting in a much larger living room with a bigger group of friends. In other words, a lot of commentary was focused on how fast Pelosi rose to her feet or placing bets on when we would finally hear the phrase "clean coal."

But occaisionally there was a spark of deliberation. And though it seemed a mere speck in a large mine of banality, someone would inevitably catch it and react. So small pockets of conversation were flittering around and I saw as voyeour -- all the while keeping to myself but reading along.