Marking a clutch of (genuinely very good) student essays on the interrelationship between social media and journalism reminds me of something that happened a couple of years ago.
At the time of the possible Grexit crisis, one of our journalism lecturers, the very-soon-to-be Dr Savyasaachi Jain, saw me in the corridor and suggested, given my interest in Twitter, that he and I collaborate on a paper about Yanis Varoufakis’ use of that social network, because he was harnessing it in a very direct way to talk about policies in a radically open manner.
Don’t be silly, I said, surely this is a one-off. The political animal’s still a cagey, on-message creature. Varofakis is entertaining, sure, but he’s an outlier when it comes to politicians’ future use of Twitter.
I’m big enough to admit that I may have been wrong on that one.