One of the annoyingly repetitive topics of conversation during 2009 was ‘Old media is dead. I read about such and such a story on Twitter first.’
To my mind hearing about something and reading an article about something are two different things altogether.
If I hear a rumour about something from a friend prior to it breaking in the media, I don’t suddenly turn around and stop buying the Irish Times everyday and ask my friend to tell me all that is happening in the world today.
Twitter is an amazing tool to watch a headline spread across a network. A headline though is completely different to a story.
Here’s an example. When Tsutomu Yamaguchi died, Twitter lit up for a moment. You probably didn’t notice though because all you would have heard about is that the only official survivor of both atomic bombs in Japan had died.
About a week or two later I read his obituary in the Economist and I was fascinated. The man behind the headline was far more interesting than just the fact that he was a survivor of two nuclear bombs. Yamaguchi’s emotional struggle with what he had experienced could not be limited to 140 characters.
His poetry and recollections of his experiences simply cannot be summed up in a soundbite. You need to sit down and take the time to read his story and hopefully learn a lesson from why he called his book ‘The Human Raft’. Here’s the Economist’s obituary for anyone that’s interested.
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Why Twitter Won’t Replace The Mainstream Media”
becuase nobody asked it to
I agree totally Piaras, interesting post.
I admit that sometimes, as I don’t watch a lot of news, Twitter serves like the ‘ticker’ on Sky News, so if there is some trending news, I can see what it is on Twitter, and try to stay in the loop.
Most of the time, I find trending topics such as #Big Brother or #Now Playing of little or no interest whatsoever. 140 characters is a very limited amount of space to convey anything, particularly when you have to allow around 30 of those for a ‘read more’ shortened link.
You’re left with a headline-sized space, and a link you want to draw attention to, as the extent of what you can shout into the void.
Another point worth is that Twitter users seem to be early adopters on the Tech scene, so there are amazingly over-represented retweets on Tech news, such as iPad, Google Wave, Buzz, HTML 5, Andriod, and so on.
A lot of people end up talking about all of these free products (or the architecture they run on) as if they paid for them, and are expert reviewers as to how the product could have best succeeded. (I’m doing it myself here about Twitter!) We do not have any established criteria of qualification for these user views.
With respect to news, we’re back to the oft-maligned ‘information overload’ dilemma early internet users were reported to experience. One of the things Twitter is great for, is finding people who are passionate about a theme that is of interest to you, and allowing them to wade through all of the relevant articles on the web, and cherry pick those most relevant to your interest area.
Where it fails is when users decide to bomb the service to make a non-event ‘news’. Therefore we find a lot of false Celebrity Death reports, that are then picked up by lazy journalists, and that become mainstream news, before anyone has checked any of the sources.
I suppose you could call this filtering, and Twitter has none of it.