Read the opposing opinion here.
Most of my friends make fun of me for actually appreciating and using Twitter. “It’s unnecessary,” they say. Some think I’m a Belieber (a member of the shapeless mass of twelve-year-old girls who tweet their undying devotion to their Queen Bieb). Others take a limited perspective on the service, focusing on its occasional obsession with bizarre trends like #ReplaceRihannaSongTitlesWithCake.
Yet Twitter, and in fact, modern, to-the-minute news media in its mobile and online forms is deeper than any of its many flaws suggest. If you follow the right people and organizations, tune into the right networks, mentally filter out the insane fandom hashtags and the Kim Kardashian updates, and avoid actually following people you know on Twitter, (who are, in my experience, just as bad as the Beliebers), you can cobble together a compelling, up-to-the-instant source of both breaking news and analysis from anywhere.
There is a veritable news symphony constantly being played, first with the news ticker and 24-hour coverage, then news networks online, news hubs like the Huffington Post, and now, Twitter (and, for that matter, the rest of the Internet — Twitter is simply its best summarizer, proponent, and sounding board). No matter what the minutiae of one’s interests are, it’s possible to find a news source that will address them. To take a random example, if you’re desperate to be the first to know when news happens at Google, Bing or Yahoo!, there’s always Search Engine Land, @sengineland.
In addition to more traditional news coverage, which continues to provide in-depth reporting on and analysis of events and stories, various news organizations dutifully tweet whenever news breaks (a news tweet informed me that Whitney Houston had died last weekend); others use their Twitter accounts as platforms to address their longer works of journalism to a broad audience. The New York Times uses its many Twitter accounts aggressively, and draws in plenty of traffic to its website from the re-tweeting and sharing of its links. Virtually every major news organization has a Twitter presence, meaning that any consumer of the media can engage with news sources like a hungry fat man at an endless buffet.
While one might argue that constant streaming is actually bad for the media, that ramming news into 140-character bursts is reductive and potentially damaging, saying so ignores the endless process of sound-bite-ization that has taken over the news as it has made its way onto television. Yet it does more than simply shorten the news (and it hardly does that); Twitter gives journalists a platform to discuss their work, their stories, and their lives. It allows readers to engage with the producers of news in real time, asking questions, giving suggestions, and providing commentary in a way that has never before been possible.
Perhaps the most obvious and important way in which Twitter and instant media has been helpful is that it is an excellent way to reach a particular stratum of the news-reading public whose interests in accuracy and timeliness combine with a desire for analysis and thoughtful reporting. Tweets facilitate the conjoining of those wishes in one central place, while quick, breaking-news updates online reach those who don’t have the time or interest to read longer pieces in a more traditional format.
Life moves fast, and with nearly seven billion people in the world, news moves faster. Twitter and instant media are simply the best way to keep afloat, and to remain engaged in it all.
@GaryGerbrandt‘14 (garygerbrandt@college) may be #overstimulated, but golly, is he #informed!