Newspaper Twitter: applied drama and microblogging

This paper discusses the use of applied drama within the microblogging platform Twitter as a method to increase students' social media and news literacy. Online news sites are increasingly using Twitter as a source for eyewitness accounts of events or public opinion. Twitter offers users a simple way to publicly broadcast or 'tweet' about news, activities, thoughts and feelings, or to share links, videos or photographs, all through a piece of text under 140 characters in length. The site has received a lot of attention due to its use in recent events such as the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia; the Tunisian protests and the Egyptian uprising. The use of Twitter by the mainstream news media gives their news stories authenticity at a time when its credibility is dropping due to the accessibility of news from independent or citizen journalists who publish via social media sites. This creates an opportunity for an applied drama exercise to encourage students to use Twitter to reconsider the messages being broadcast by mainstream news media. This paper presents a case study of Australian university students as creators/performers/publishers of reframed media messages, using online and classroom performance. The author adopts a participant observer role to describe the preparation and delivery of a classroom-based pilot study of a mediated applied drama method.