Twitter Storytelling Ted Talk

Andrew Fitzgerald: Adventures in Twitter Fiction

Summary: In this talk, Andrew Fitzgerald discusses for around 11 minutes about how storytelling has evolved in our society and in the Digital Age. He starts off in his talk going back to the 1930's when radio was the "new" way of storytelling when everyone gathered around this new technology and listened to the speaker on the radio tell the story. Now about 90 years later, there is a whole new way to tell stories and that is through the power of Twitter. Nowadays, authors can tell stories digitally. These authors have their own Twitter accounts and tweet out their story line-by-line through each individual tweet, therefore; the followers of the account that are reading the story can read the story line-by-line by simply refreshing the page and following the story through each tweet. Twitter users can also follow different characters speaking during the story in order to get different perspectives of the digital story being told. Fitzgerald argues that this the way our generation can watch stories as they unfold line-by-line, It will create much more suspense and get kids in our age to read. 

Point of the Speaker: 

• Ethos- Andrew Fitzgerald uses his expertise and great knowledge of the social media tool of Twitter in order to advertise a new way for Twitter and journalists to work together to share their creations. Fitzgerald happens to be a member of the News and Journalism Partnerships team at Twitter, so he is very credible in this subject he is discussing. He seemed to have great knowledge in what he was talking about with the way he presented himself and the examples of accounts he used when talking about Twitter storytelling.  
• Pathos- Fitzgerald does not appear in his talk to appeal to any particular emotions of the audience. He mainly just discusses these new ideas in a normal, informative tone. He does get the audience laughing in some parts of the talk, but other than that, he is pitching his new ideas in a casual tone. Emotion would not really be an effective strategy in this talk to get sway the audience to his side. Having Twitter has an all-new way to tell stories is a subject that is hard to draw any emotion from. A person will either decide to listen to stories the old-fashioned way or the digital way. 
• Logos- In order for Fitzgerald's audience to get a visual representation of what he was talking about, he puts up screenshots of these story-telling Twitter accounts on the monitor and displays authors telling their story bit-by-bit through each tweet they put out, This is the evidence he uses in order to prove that this is indeed the new way for journalists to share their stories for all to see. He also uses a pretty neat example of an account that tweets out World War II events that happened on the particular day the tweet is sent. It is formatted like a newspaper article. There could be possible show of bias throughout his talk since he does in fact work for Twitter and this is his way of advertising the new thing that Twitter can do. He presents these ideas in a very strong, convincing way and seemed to really captivate the audience. I was very engaged as well. This new way of sharing stories is just how the future is shaping to be.                                                  

Personal Relationship: This talk immediately caught my eye when I saw the word "Twitter" since I am an avid user of social media and I thought it would very interesting to see how story-telling and Twitter can relate to each other. I was wondering how it was possible that these two different topics can work with each other, but as the talk went on, I was very fascinated by what he was talking about. It was very cool and really funny how stories can be tweeted line-by-line and Twitter users can read them be refreshing the page. These tweets come out at a normal reading pace and it builds up suspense for the reader to know what is going to happen next in the story with each individual tweet. Very, very awesome. 

Walter Neff Character Analysis

In film noir, many of the male leads are weak, frustrated men. While you are watching Double Indemnity, make a mental note of Walter Neff’s characteristics. What kind of man is he? What is his relationship like with women?

In the film of Double Indemnity, Walter Neff was an interesting character who had a weird relationship with a woman that he met in the beginning named Phyllis Dietrichson. At first, I did not get the first impression of Walter as a "weak" man. He was very successful at his work and seemed very focused at what he was doing all the time. Phyllis and Walter first meet at the beginning of the film and Walter is struck by her beauty. He also gave off the impression as a very confident man and maybe a little overconfident. He calls Phyllis "baby" in just about every sentence talking to her. That expresses confidence and a little bit obnoxious as well. If anything, Walter Neff shows little signs of weakness in the beginning of the movie.

Walter Neff's character quickly goes downhill throughout the film and is viewed more and more as a criminal. He starts by getting attached and developing a relationship with Phyllis, who is in fact, a married woman. He also murders two people which shows lack discipline for himself because he was blind from his attraction to Phyllis. He basically partners with her in a murder/scam plot all out of love. This is where his weakness starts to show. He would do anything to keep this woman happy and try to win her over. His feelings overtake his common sense. She seduced him and manipulated Walter to help execute her plan. 

Clearly, Phyllis was the controlling one in the relationship. Walter was a very conflicted man and didn't know right from wrong anymore as the film progressed. She loves to flirt and seduce him, so she can get what she wants.