The Significance of Twitter As Media

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• Twitterific

Back in 1996 when the Internet was still a baby I remember spending breakfast time with a paper in my hands and idling over yesterdays news for an hour or so. Not much has changed today, I still idle over the news but I read/watch it as it happens and I do not take it all from one or two sources, oh and I don’t read it off of a dead tree.

Information needs to be read, understood and absorbed but when you are presented with too much it can get overwhelming, as is the case on the internet. RSS gave us the option to aggregate the information we wanted as it was published, but something was lacking. It was more or less a one sided affair.

Soon social media started to take over, you could now read an article that was recommended by other readers who had more or less similar interests to yours. But here too things started getting a bit gray, as you could never really know whether the content you were reading was just not “herd mentality” at its best.

Twitter on the other hand is a social media maverick, if you will allow me to use that word, and here’s why…

People on twitter pretty much do the same thing as they would on other social networks.

• Status updates,
• sharing links & photos,
• conversing with friends
• even the odd marraige proposal and fight as well

Pretty much normal in today’s world. Except for the fact that it can all be done via one single interface and it HAS to be done in 140 characters or less. This makes the information not only easy to transmit, but easy to absorb as well.

Twitters Success As A Media Source Lies In Its Simplicity

To repeat an old cliché, the world is getting smaller and even though there are 24 hours in a day they seem to go by pretty fast. That’s why at the end of the day simple wins, and Twitter has nailed that process in.

You are more likely to hear of a plane crash, an earthquake, a Ob/Gyn visit gone horribly wrong {OK, that doesn’t happen often} and much more on twitter first rather than the mainstream media – who are basically weapons of mass distraction.

In a connected world, everybody needs their information as concise and as quickly as possible. If you have a following on twitter and you are in a position to let people know about anything newsworthy happening around you in an instant, you should.

This officially makes you a broadcaster, in lesser terms. News is no longer filtered, censored or controlled by conglomerates. It is now unfiltered, uncensored and spread by first person accounts, and you are the first person.

As Uncle Ben once greatly said, With great power comes great responsibility.