One of the things I remember most about the early days of Twitter, once I integrated it into my daily life and disabused myself of the notion that it was some sort of lame Dodgeball clone¹, was that I enjoyed the way it encouraged me to notice things.  I remember first becoming aware of this on a solo road trip I took through New Mexico in 2007, where, lacking a traveling companion, I found myself constantly on the lookout for interesting observations to report back to my Twitter following.  I’ve never been one to keep a journal (much to my chagrin as an inveterate collector of fancy stationery), but, silly as it may sound, Twitter made me feel like a field correspondent—our man on the Rio Grande—and thus encouraged me to think like a journalist.

I’ve been thinking about this again lately because of Instagram. Instagram is now at the ideal size where it has a large enough, active enough, and interesting enough network to provide immediate, satisfying feedback when I post, but it’s still small and casual enough to feel personal and journal-like.  Since I’ve been using it, I’ve found myself once again paying close attention to my surroundings in search of interesting observations in a way I haven’t since the earliest days of Twitter², and I’m pleased with the way it has me thinking journalistically with renewed vigor.

Unfortunately, as many will be quick to point out, there’s a glaring weakness of “realtime” services like Twitter and Instagram as journalistic outlets: their narrow focus on “the now” and their relative disregard for the archival.  While on one hand the off-the-cuff, throwaway nature of Twitter or Instagram may be a big part of their appeal to otherwise reluctant amateur journalists, on the other hand it’s a pretty poor journal that can’t be easily recalled later.

I’ve struggled a bit with this myself (I still dearly wish I could access my earliest tweets to put together my own tweet book), but I’ve recently found comfort in my friend Kellan’s notion of “long form tweeting.”. Increasingly, I’ve come to think of Twitter and Instagram as notebooks where I develop and discuss ideas that I later elaborate on on my personal blog (I like to think of it a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks full of fragmentary ideas, if you’ll permit me a bit of pretension).  ”Real time” services are great for journalistic impetus and visceral feedback, but I’ve come go think of Tumblr as my final draft.