And you thought Twitter was just a fad
It started with a flurry of short messages. “I felt an earthquake” came one message from peanutbrittle25. “EARTH QUAKE in Beijing?? Yup” came a reply from dtan.
Short messages like these spread across the world and for the rest of today people were glued to their screens to watch what was happening. With updates direct from the scene. But these weren’t traditional news outlets. The messages spread through Twitter.
Social networking works because I connect with my friends and then they connect with their friends. This pattern continues and means that messages can travel very quickly between people – one person tells everybody they know; all of these people then tell everybody they know. And so on.
This is what happened today with twitter and the earthquake in China. It became a “crowd-sourced” reporting tool with people on the ground being able to report what’s happening, what it’s really like, where they were when it happened, what happened next. All the questions people want to know when events are unfolding, and the kind of details that traditional journalists would hunt out to report the next day. With twitter we can, and could, get this information in real-time and well-connected people could act as nodes, receiving and transmitting the updates.
Innovation in news has often been about reducing the time between an eye-witness reporting on an event and it getting to the reader. The Crimean War was a big step forward as the extension of railways and telegraph networks across Europe let reports come back in just a few days – ‘real-time’ reporting as it felt in the 19th Century. Today we can reduce this time to practically nothing. Somebody can witness an event, text twitter and the network effect on the web spreads the message around the world. Now that’s a rather exciting development!
Of course, this doesn’t mean the end of professional journalism; peanutbrittle25 works for the BBC in Beijing, as a journalist!
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Kelsey:
Hey Matt,
I’ve newly been following your blog and I have yet to explore twitter though I’ve been reading a lot about it and trying to wrap my head around it. Do you ever worry about credibility in terms of relying on these types of sources? That would be my only worry. As someone with a journalism background I think having credible sources is of utmost importance, because obviously without them, your own credibility could be threatened. Just a thought…interesting post!
12 May 2008, 9:32 pmMatt Rhodes:
Hey Kelsey,
Thanks for the comment and glad to hear you read the blog.
You are, of course, right. As with any information you need to be sure where it’s come from and that the source is informed and trustworthy. I think there are a couple of things that are inherent to social media and social networking that can help here:
1) People usually tell you lots about who they are. Most people’s Twitter profiles have links to their blogs where you can read a lot more about what they say, think and know; and of course you can usually look back through all the previous updates they’ve written. To some extent we now have a surfeit of information – we know more about people than we ever did before. So to some extent we can check the authenticity of commentators based on what else we can find out about them
2) With almost all events, there will be more than one person reporting it. Whilst lots of people can be simultaneously wrong, this kind of peer validation is another good tool to use. If something is real then the chances are more than one person you know will be reporting on it.
So – if there’s an update from somebody you can’t find anything else about, and on a subject nobody else reports, then the chances are I’d trust it less. Of course in reality things are less black and white than this.
Twitter’s great – I only started using it when we were experimenting with it at work for various internal things. But then people I don’t know started following me and it’s grown from there.
Sign up for an account, see if anybody else you know is on there and then add more ’similar’ people using something like http://www.whoshouldifollow.com. Then take it from there. As I was told once, if nothing else the 140 word limit will help you to perfect your brief web 2.0 writing style (something I’ve clearly broken with this response!)
Matt
12 May 2008, 9:59 pmKelsey:
Really good points Matt, thanks for the advice! It’s great how blogging and the whole social media phenomena is forcing me to start thinking differently…it’s really fascinating. I’m going to set up an account and try it out. Thanks again!!
13 May 2008, 4:18 pmFreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Test Match Special via Twitter:
[...] love the way that people are experimenting with Twitter at the moment (see earlier post on how Twitter spread news of the Earthquake in China). It’s always struck me that too often people embrace new technology by trying to use the [...]
16 May 2008, 10:44 pm