By: Chris Kaftan, Contributing Author
A year ago, I’d have laughed in your face if you told me I’d be using Twitter on a frequent basis.
Heck, I would have asked you “what is a twitter?”
Now it is a big part of my daily activities — from finding out what friends are up to or hearing about hot topics, it has become the tool that the developers intended it to be — a microblog.
When my mom ranted a couple of months ago about where I find all this time to do Facebook, blogging, and tweeting, I just didn’t bother answering. Part of me knew she wouldn’t understand what I would explain to her. The bottom line…it doesn’t take much time or effort.
I recently wrote a new column for my regular piece at i711.com and this column focused on how these multimedia tools have replaced several mainstays in the deaf community — particularly deaf periodicals. In that column, I explained how tweeting and updating one’s status on Facebook has replaced the way we receive news.
Remember how when Michael Jackson died, he nearly brought the Internet with him? We, as a society, crave instant results. Instant gratification. As a former high school teacher, I see that all the time now. My students want to know their grades now, now and now.
Deaf blogger and tweeter Jared Evans (@jaredev) recently presented at the DCARA vlog symposium and was gracious enough to allow people who read his blog to view his PowerPoint presentation. One story from his presentation stood out for me.
Just how powerful Twitter can be in the community.
The world’s biggest online movie ordering service does not caption their online service. Yes. I’m talking about Netflix.
It’s been going around in the blogging community that the Netflix Chief Product Officer (gee-they have a position called that?) wrote a blog last June explaining, among other things, that, “…The majority of viewers would object to English captions on English content, so we have to figure out how to let individual viewers turn them on and off.” Excuse my English, but what kind of dumb response is that from the Netflix CPO?
Not only that, Netflix’s production company, Red Envelope Entertainment – which has apparently just closed – does not caption any of the independent films they purchase and mass-produce.
Neil Hunt, Netflix’s CPO, says that this isn’t something that can be quickly addressed. He said in the blog post, “captioning is in our development plans but is about a year away.”
Hunt also claims that in order to process the text files for each movie, especially the ones they provide through Silverlight – their online viewing service – it will take 500 processor months to make one encode.
I don’t buy it. Neither do other web programmers that I know.
If Hulu and other online movie and television services can provide text for the captions, why can’t Netflix? They’ve long been neglecting the Deaf and hard-of-hearing Community’s requests – and to some degree, actually not caring.
Oscar-winning actress Marlee Matlin led a protest of sorts on her Twitter account (@MarleeMatlin) to bring attention to the folks at Netflix that the deaf community wants this to happen sooner.
In his PowerPoint presentation at the DCARA symposium, Evans illustrated that in the days after the furor started, because of the ability to do searches in Twitter (#Netflix) and RT (retweeting), word of what Netflix said flew through space like the Millennium Falcon. In a week, Matlin doubled the number of followers from 5,000 to nearly 10,000. All because of RT’ing.
With Twitter, we have gained a powerful tool that can be used to measure how news gets to us.
Chris Kaftan is a blogger, a tweeter, and a Facebooker. Kaftan has a blog covering the New York Yankees at www.generationthird.com. He also has his own personal blog at www.historyofck.com and Twitter at @HistoryofCK. He is a native of Woodstock, NY and currently lives in Maryland. Kaftan can be reached at ckaftan@yahoo.com.
http://www.i711.com/my711.php?tab=2&article=302
http://www.jaredlog.com/?p=1101
http://blog.netflix.com/2009_06_01_archive.html
