#WhatIsNASAFor and the Defending NASA
Keith’s note: According to this high level analysis of the impact of Twitter using the hashtag #WhatIsNASAFor between 7-10 February, a total of 17,597,370 impacts were made. On this chart Twitter impacts are calculated by multiplying the number of tweets someone makes times the number of followers they have. Personally I think “reach” and “impact” are more complex than this – but this gives you a general idea of the relative scale of impacts.
@NASA tweeting resulted in 17,597,370 impacts. @NASASocial produced 7,627,023. @NASAWatch produced 5,296,071 and @SpaceRef produced 1,632,662. However members of the NASA Social community and others were also responsible for a substantial number of impacts on Twitter as well. Of note is @AgilistaAG (Angela Gibson) who was the main power behind the mobilization of the NASASocial community. This is a new and growing trend.
This response is similar to what happened during the government shutdown when NASA was unable to talk about itself but Twitter users with the #WhatNASAMightTweet hashtag mounted a similarly large response. Its one thing to respond to matters of an urgent nature with surges of interest and support.
Also, FYI NASA did very little tweeting in response to #WhatIsNASAFor (@NASA only made 3 Tweets, @NASASocial made 7). Indeed, PAO and mission staff around the agency more or less totally ignored this activity on social media even though they were made aware of it internal to NASA. Had NASA gotten off its collective butt and engaged in a more aggressive presence on Twitter, the the “impact” would be measured in hundreds of millions. Now that Charles Seife has released a more detailed rant – one that openly mocks NASA’s initial response, it will be interesting to see if NASA and its supporters step up or sit this out.
If NASA cannot be bothered to defend and explain itself, then why should anyone be inclined to do so? Maybe Siefe is right after all and NASA is an endangered species.
I think the NASA social media movement impact could grow exponentially (from within NASA) without the fear of being fired for unknowingly sharing something that is ITAR restricted.
OK, I am very late to the Twitterverse, but “@NASAWatch produced 5,296,071 and @SpaceRef produced 1,632,662” seem to me like awfully big numbers. Bravo Keith.
Am I the only one who has a hard time coming up with a defense or explanation for NASA’s current humam space program? I can tell you the reasons for every program upthrough Shuttle. I can tell you why we stated ISS. I cannot give a reasonable explanation for ISS’s expense or time that ittook and I no longer am sure what the program’s goal is. And the programs since the Vision are not defendable. I don’t think they have legitimate goals. I don’t think NASA has a plan or a strategy. I don’t think I am alone. The current human space program appears, to everyone I know, inside and outside of the program, to be collapsed and a disaster.
My father having worked on the Saturn 5 pretty well educated me on the subject long before the public schools even mentioned it. The first mention of space flight was in the 5th grade just weeks prior to the Challenger disaster. The space shuttle was a cargo craft specifically designed to put a space station in orbit, the original configuration was a ring. The goal was to put a platform from which deeper space missions could safely be staged. From orbit the hope was to be able to assemble then build a station on the moon. Once that was accomplished, the next goal was to place a base on Mars. Through political intrigue and various forms of fraud, abuse and corruption NASA was slowly robbed of it’s financial resources and it’s goals. I would have stuck around UHCL near JSC and wrote a book on it but the same garbage is ongoing, thousands of contractors were loosing there jobs as of 2005 just after the CAU project was canceled, as a result when my family relocated I did too, even though I was poised to be a long term space flight influncer. Things didn’t get any better else where and Obama wrecked the economy in the rest of the nation, you can thank international free trade policy for the majority of our problems, get rich quick schemes for the rest. The major issues started in the late 70’s and have never been addressed. No matter who is in office they keep doing the same thing, and it’s only a few billionaires that are benefiting, the whole of America is rotting.
I’m 44 and don’t use Twitter, I only know one person who uses it daily and she is in the IT business and feels like she has too. Twitter stock price tanked recently because it is experiencing “negative trends in user growth and engagement”. The Twitter fad is about over.
Yes, yes. They said that about Fax machines, email, and Facebook too. No one ever adopted them. No one still uses them.
Twitter suffered the same fate as Facebook forced to have public offering to early. The right method of monitization hasn’t been invented yet. Knowing you must live in either a retirement community or an Amish one.
Keith, I think there’s a difference because of the rapid speed with which revenue streams can alter today, as opposed to when fax and email were introduced, and they were more about functionality and saving money, whereas Twitter, at root, is about making money. If something new comes along when Twitter revenues have peaked, I think Twitter could easily fade away, or at least be much less ubiquitous than it is now. As for the users, they will use whatever the service providers tell them is hot and make affordable.
I agree with your point in general, but I don’t think it’s apples and apples.
Lol do you still use Fax machines? In the 1990’s I used them daily but haven’t used one in ~6 years now because of PDF and email. Twitter doesn’t even have the distinction of being a technology, it’s just another application like Myspace, Facebook, Google+
I use fax machines regularly because other people still do. As for Twitter – it is quite clear by now that you do not like it. That’s fine. No one will miss you.
Unfortunately fax machines still exist especially in the banking sector. Some banks have services which will only allow remote business transaction by fax. Of course you don’t need a fax machine per se, you can send a fax through a computer.
NASA may indeed be an endangered species, but if so, I don’t think it’s Siefe’s babbling that is the cause. In the long run I think Siefe will be just more noise below the threshold of any real “impact.”
Rather, I’d say it’s the combined indifference of the general public and the perpetual misuse of NASA by Congress that is slowly but surely hammering the nails into NASA’s coffin. And in all fairness to the general public, they have been given little during the last decade or so to interest them in NASA’s activities — in terms that the average person is familiar with.
I am not a social media user myself as a rule (at 59 my family has finally got me to start texting on my phone), by I can see where the various social media facilities, used in a professional manner by the people within or representing NASA, could effectively be the bridge between the high-tech, high-speed NASA world and the everyday world of the general public — a language/concept translator of sorts. The catch is that both sides would have to participate with this goal in mind, and in a way that provides this “translation.” Mostly what I’ve seen so far (though I haven’t purposely gone looking) is people on the NASA side of the equation trying to sound like the people on the public side, instead of providing this badly needed translation.
Short social media messages can be used to point to longer, more inclusive messages (web pages, etc.), which can in turn point to other, more detailed “translations,” etc. In that way, each reader can progress through available documents to their own level of ability and comfort. The catch, of course, is that this requires an organized — and coordinated — approach on the “NASA side” of the mechanism. And as Keith has pointed out so often, this just isn’t happening, and no signs of it even being attempted can be seen by either the public or the insiders like NASAWatch and many (apparent) NASA employees and contractors who post here and elsewhere.
It seems to me that the outstanding question which must be answered first is: Is NASA not doing this because they simply haven’t figured out how to go about it, or have they deliberately chosen, for whatever reason(s), not to do it? The answer to that, I think, would point to where we should be pushing NASA, and whether there is any point in doing so.
“Is NASA not doing this because they simply haven’t figured out how to go about it, or have they deliberately chosen, for whatever reason(s), not to do it?”
IMO the first possibility appears more plausible.
One significant problem NASA has had for many years is the proliferation with so much disorganized stuff all over the iternet that a large portion of the public has no idea what tolook for, what is current, what is fifty years old, what is accurate, what is important.
I know NASA PAO has recruited a bunch of volunteers who post all kinds of things via email, Facebook, Twitter,……it is not bad enough that I get the same email multiple times a day from NASA centers and headquarters telling me to look on Google to see what is new. But others are sending me a variety, some repetitive, some ‘echos’ of NASA emails.
If they appear repetitive I tune it out. If it appears the messages have nothing to do with space or NASA, and many don’t, I tune it out. I don’t need to reminded that if I am looking for information I should look on the internet, and I have NASAWatch and a half dozen other webpages or blogs that keep me up to date. NASA putting out reminders of no particular information content is not helpful.
I don’t think NASA needs more volume. There is more than enough quantity. NASA needs to strategize its message(s) and make sure it is strategically communicated, otherwise all those tweets are just so much noise.
Keith I see your point, but I have a have a different take. I think that letting the general public mount a massive defense of NASA was more powerful than responding to the uninformed rant by Siefe.
Also, NASA is so much more than human space flight…