First attempt at live-tweeting poses challenges but engages me in cool community conversations

My mom always told me that you can't be in two places at once. Obviously, she has never live-tweeted an event. This week marks my first attempt at live-tweeting. Being present both in person and on social media really felt like trying to be in two places at once. Though more difficult than expected, it was nice to call home and say, "Hey Mom! I did it!"

As part of the Milwaukee Film Festival, "Romeo is Bleeding" showed at the Oriental Theatre. A question and answer session with the filmmakers and a panel discussion about youth activism followed the screening. I attended with some of the high school student activists I work with at Urban Underground and set out to capture as much of the event as possible via Twitter. To my relief, I was not the only one excited about the film or engaged in the conversation around it on social media. It was awesome to see photos of the line wrapped around the theater on Twitter. 

My goal was to communicate essentially what was said and the vibe of the space so people could feel involved without being there. The hope was that those reading my correspondence would want to learn more about the film and see it for themselves as well as follow up with the featured community organizations doing great work in Milwaukee. 

Honestly, I’m not sure if I met my goal as well as I would have liked, but I did learn a lot in the process. It was quite the challenge to stay up to speed when different people were speaking and to pick and choose which were the most important points to tweet on the spot. It was hard to know when would be a good time to stop typing in order to take a photo to add visual appeal to the content I was generating. Live tweeting proved to be a hectic experience that I am looking forward to improving on with more practice.
 
Thankfully, others on social media filled in the gaps of what I missed that day. Scrolling through the relevant hashtags on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook provided a more complete narrative than I was able to communicate on my own.
 
Compiling a Storify of the day was an opportunity to put these pieces together in a way that better told the story. The ability to easily combine different types of media from different sources into one piece is what made Storify a fun and effective means of sharing context, the experience itself and peoples’ reactions to it. The youth who inspired the film and those who spoke on the panel that day amazed me with their passion, creative expression and dedication to improving their communities. Hopefully the Storify makes the reader feel that same energy.