There’s been plenty of debate lately about whether Twitter has become “mainstream” or not, but examples continue to pile up of how the social network/microblogging platform has worked its way into our lives, to the point where it has become a form of media unto itself. Whether it will ever become mainstream in the sense that it gets used by your aunt or grandmother is almost irrelevant — the reality is that, for all its flaws, Twitter is a publishing tool, and an increasingly powerful one. And it can be used by anyone, journalist and non-journalist alike.
Examples:
Several days ago, a Japanese journalist who was kidnapped in Afghanistan managed to trick his captors into letting him post a message about his location to Twitter. It’s not clear from the news reports whether his tweets helped get him released or not, but it is yet another example of how easy Twitter makes it to broadcast that kind of news — and not just to one or two people, the way email or text messaging does, but to potentially hundreds or even thousands (in 2008, Twitter helped American photojournalist James Buck spread the news that he had been arrested by Egyptian police while covering an anti-government protest).
Two other examples of Twitter as a news platform are the recent hostage-taking and shootout at Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, and the earthquake that hit near New Zealand last week. In the first case, reports about a gunman in the Discovery building started coming in before the news was on a mainstream news outlet. And in the case of the earthquake — as in similar cases involving earthquakes in China and forest fires in California — reports flooded the Twitter network while most mainstream media outlets were still unaware that it had even occurred. One resident said she relied on news she got from Twitter more than the radio, because it was a lot faster (although it should be noted that she is a Twitter fan and web consultant).
You can finish reading this story at Gigaom
No comments:
Post a Comment