Up Up and Away
Twitter was all abuzz yesterday afternoon as news outlets broke the story of what seemed to be a 6-year old adrift in a homemade hot-air balloon, several thousand feet over Colorado. While many of us turned on CNN and other cable channels, many flocked to live video on the web.
Social media kicked into high gear, particularly Twitter as people discussed the situation. For a few hours at least, this potentially grievous tale had our collective attention. And while it now appears that the whole thing may have been a hoax, there are some lessons here about us and about news in this age of social media, particularly Twitter.
- Twitter allows us to break news faster – there have been numerous occasions where someone on Twitter has broken a story (a plane crash, an earthquake, etc) well before major news outlets are on the case. All it takes is someone who uses Twitter (and there are a lot of us!) to be on the scene…or perhaps part of the story itself. As Twitter grows, we will realize what a powerful tool we have at our disposal. When someone asks, “Where were you when…..?” many of us will answer, “On Twitter!”
- Twitter allows for a more rapid dissemination of the news – when a story broke, it took word of mouth, phone calls, leaning over the fence, to let our friends and neighbors know. It took time for people to discover what was going on. The time it takes for news to reach all of us is rapidly diminishing. This shows great potential, particularly in times of local and national crisis: floods, earthquakes, war, etc.
- Twitter changes the way we report the news – It is now not uncommon to see a newscaster reading Twitter messages off of their Blackberry while on the air. It will be interesting to see how mainstream media adapts to this new world. The Fourth Estate has been slow getting on board the social media train, but it will happen. And those who adapt faster will benefit most. I see a time coming when the mainstream media is not only reading Twitter on the air, but also using Twitter as part of the news gathering and reporting process (aside from merely pushing out stories via an RSS feed).
- Twitter unifies us – We’ve had those great unifying moments: presidential assassinations, first man on the moon, the Challenger explosion, 9/11, and so on. These are the moments where everything stops and we share the good and the bad. But often we are watching from our homes, disconnected from the world. Now, we can tweet along. Yesterday, many of us were commenting on the situation as it unfolded. And little ol’ me was able to connect with friends, while at the same time seeing social media savvy Alyssa Milano was tweeting that she couldn’t bear to watch when the balloon finally landed. For just a moment, all of us were connected.
- The hoax factor – yesterday’s story may have been a well-planned out hoax. I’m sure we’ll hear much more on this today. But one would think that unmediated outlets like Twitter would be rife with rumors and false stories. But they rarely occur, and when they do, i.e. the “death” of Zach Braff earlier this week, the social media world is quick to act and quash those rumors. There is little tolerance for misinformation online. So while a story can grow legs and go viral rather quickly, based on just one Tweet, it can be cut off at the knees just as fast. While news spreads fast, rumors can also be killed quickly. The collective knowledge and wisdom of everyone on Twitter has amazing potential in terms of checks and balances.
I find this interesting on a variety of levels. First, as a former reporter, I’m a bit of a news geek. Second, much of my graduate work centered around a semiotic analysis of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938, and how it was received by the public. I find myself thinking about how things like that broadcast, or real news stories like the aforementioned presidential assassinations, wars, 9/11, and Challenger explosion, might have been covered if Twitter had been around. We can only speculate.
Would World War II have been conducted differently? Government censorship and propaganda were major factors during that war. What role would have been played by Twitter and social media? Would the war have ended sooner? Lasted longer?
It boggles the mind to think about these sorts of things. But I’m excited to see how social media and the world of news interact. From the Presidential debates to airplane crashes, Twitter has shown it’s value and importance in the news process. Mainstream news outlets need to figure out how to tap into social media and remain relevant. Case in point: have you ever visited a television or newspaper website? Generally they are among the ugliest and least user-friendly sites online. It’s time for the mainstream news media to give up their fear of this newfangled thing we call the Internet.
You can read more on this on my page about Social Media vs. Traditional Media.
What’s your favorite story about the dissemination of the news via social media? What role do you think Twitter and other technological advances will play in the breaking and reporting of news in this Web 2.0 world?
