If you’ve quivered in fear over the announcement that Yale (and, by extension, every tournament I tab henceforth) will be on Twitter, I understand your pain. But it’s not as bad as it sounds.
First of all, if you’re already on Twitter, all you’ve got to do is follow @DebateTab and you’re 99% there. Then just turn the phone notification on during the tournament (set to stun) and turn it off when the results are posted. End of story. (Or almost the end. We've also got @speechtab and @congresstab in CP's grubby little hands. He also managed to sneak the more generic @tabroom away from me when I wasn't looking, the weasel, but given that he already has a website called tabroom.com, I guess it's best in the long run. Still, it was pretty a weaselly move: I gotta admit, I was proud of him!)
Of course, if you’re not already a Twitterer, you’ve got to become one. I posted the instructions at http://www.jimmenick.com/twitter.html, not that it’s particularly difficult. I mean, if Ashton Kutcher can do it…
The nature of the tweets at a given tournament will depend on the tournament itself. At Yale, where on Friday night people are all over the map, announcing that the ballots are printed or the skems posted makes sense. In other words, put down that slice of pizza and get to your round, you yabbo! We can also page judges, if necessary, and you can contact us easily in return. At contained sites, like Yale on Saturday, it will be more general. Skems ready, schedule changes (I trust we’ll make things earlier than the printed sked), round results posted, that sort of thing. Less urgency, in other words. But still, a way for tab to communicate to the hundreds of people they’re sending hither and yon. That can’t be a bad thing, and Twitter allows us to do it efficiently. When all is said and done, it is nothing more than group IMs. Hardly earth-shattering. But when we’re all over the place, like most colleges and the occasional high school, I think it will prove useful. We’ll know soon enough.
Meanwhile, I’ll no doubt continue to tweet on my normal account, @jimmenick. If you need news reports of which students have just been arrested at the tournament for running illegal counterplans or general updates on the state of my grumpiness, you can follow that. I don’t tweet a lot, but enough to keep my hand in. I’ve also got a team Twitter account for herding Sailors when necessary. So, I guess you can say I’ve bought into this, and it would be true, for the time being, until something better comes along to do the job.
What can I say? Tweet.
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