Writing History In Real Time

"Twitterers are writing history in real time." (link)  

My Experience

Quite frankly, for the longest time I never really understood what all the buzz was about with Twitter.  When I was in high school, the popular social network (a phrase that had not been coined yet) was Myspace.  I left the country to serve a mission and returned two years later only to realize Facebook had taken over as the most widely used means of social networking, and a lot of things had changed.  I didn't know it at the time, but I definitely wasn't in Kansas anymore as far as what I understood about the internet and social media.

The first time I ever remember having a real conversation about Twitter was at the Scera Amphitheater in Provo watching Singing in the Rain.  It was a double date, and the guy in the other couple started talking about how he had a Twitter account with six followers.  At the time, I had no idea what that meant.  When they explained that it was basically the status feed on Facebook, I thought it was stupid.  Why would I want to hear about what someone had for breakfast on Facebook only to hear about it again on Twitter?  Absurd.

Fast forward.  I had left for the Philippines in 2009.  Six years later, I could never have imagined that tweeting would become such a regular source of, not only personal information, but information from a wide variety of sources, a lot of it being news.  Who could also have predicted that tweets could become such a big part of how we see the world?

A Few Articles

I found an interesting article (and we may have discussed this in class already, I can't remember) about five french-speaking journalists who secluded themselves in a cabin in southern France.  Their only sources for connecting with what was happening beyond that cabin were social networks and social media.  The journalist who wrote the article went over several observations that he had made about the experience.  He talked about an experience where he was scanning different feeds only to find in real time a man being taken into custody for a crime that he had committed... in Moscow.  He mentions, there was probably no way he would have found that source if he had not been on Twitter.  I find it interesting that the author of the article compared Twitter to a radar, in that there are often events going on that no one initially knows about.  Those events are being broadcasted by the very people that are experiencing them in real time, much like a police radar.  

In this case, Tweeting live happenings can be useful, at least in the sense of getting a story out there where traditional media sources, as Goldman mentioned, would be behind in reporting.  Now this might not have been a story for the news, but it illustrates a principle of immediacy where no other source would have had the same information at the same time as Twitter because it was literally being tweeted by someone experiencing it in real time, because often times it's hard to be in the right place at the right time where news happens.

However, another paragraph in the article talks a lot about what Gladstone and Goldman discussed on the podcast - that it is very easy to be led off course following Twitter feeds.  While they were at the cabin, there was a loud noise in Northern France that no one was able to identify.  There was so much speculation as to what the noise was - an explosion, a fire, a nuclear problem - that the French Twitter-sphere exploded with ideas.  The author later came to find out by traditional news media sources that the loud noise was just a jet breaking the sound barrier, something that no one in the Twitter-sphere had guessed.

In this case, a real life feed was of no use, because no one really knew what was going on.  Much like what had been discussed in the podcast, people reporting on the police scanner sometimes misreported what was happening and the wrong information was disseminated to the public.  In instances such as these, a "live feed," or that "zing," would be negative.

In both cases, perhaps an instant update becomes more useful as it moves from a spectator's perspective to someone who is actually experiencing the event.

Bundy

In drawing from sources even closer to home, I will admit, I haven't been much for following the Bundy story.  I was a little turned off by the fact that something that may have started out as little dispute has grown into an opportunity for both sides of the aisle to lob political grenades at each other.  However, just for fun I decided to do my monthly Twitter check to see what all hoo ha was about.  As soon as I clicked on the hashtag #bundyranch I immediately saw remarks about racism.

Like I said, I have not been following the story, but at my house, Fox News is constantly turned on on one of the television sets somewhere, and between all the accounts I had not heard anything about this yet.  It sparked some interest for me to look into it a little further.  Most of the comments that I initially saw about the incident were all negative, which I think did frame my understanding of additional sources that I came across in more formal news outlets.

Again, in this case, my initial reaction and the additional information I gathered from the tweets really flavored how the rest of what I researched felt.  As I was looking for a better source for information (the first site on Google search was Times), I was bracing for the worst.  It was hard to imagine how, based on what I had seen, Mr. Bundy could dig himself out of this one.  Now that I see the issue a little more clearly, after having watched the actual clip, I have formed my own opinion about what happened, but not without a lingering taste of what I had initially heard and felt.  Typically, I like to think that when I really research something, I my interpretation can stand alone without falling back on someone else's previous beliefs or statements, yet it is pretty hard not to discredit the initial shock or "zing" that I experienced when I first read someone else's account of what had happened.

Conclusion

I want to hearken back to the very first line of this post.  "Twitterers are writing history in real time."  That's pretty powerful when you think about it.  It was a line in an article I found as I was searching out different sources for this post.  Being a communication major, I have a pretty strong belief that communication shapes the world in which we live.  How we communicate about something determines our reality of it.  That being said, maybe that's the reason that being the first person to tweet about something is so appealing.  This initial communication, is not just the first interpretation, but an opportunity to lay the foundation for future interpretations.  If we're the first person to tweet about a situation, we are the first ones to shape the reality of what actually happened.  It's ours.  Other people will only build upon it, but that initial foundation will only be added to.  That "zing" just might be the desire in all of us to be able to say, "yeah, that's mine."

I think about my experience with the racist comments of Mr. Bundy, even though I might not agree with what was tweeted, no one will ever be able to erase that initial feeling that I got when I first read someone else's interpretation of what happened.  I measured it against everything else I read and interpreted personally and, at least for some short period of time, it was what I saw as the reality of the situation.  Even though I modified it by adding my own interpretation to it, the foundation was laid by that first tweet.

We Americans treasure the idea of "land." What was this whole Bundy ordeal about? Perceived rights about land. In this case, however, the land we're discussing is the psychological ownership of being the first to tweet something. Much like the early settlers expanding to the West, we stake our piece of land by having the fastest fingers, and everyone is to know that it's ours. In reality, that "zing" has been around a lot longer than we might have imagined. The only difference is now, instead of saying , "That plot of land there? That's mine." It's, "That tweet there? That's mine."

- Carlos