Before September of this year my impression of Twitter was that it was a format for egotistic celebrities to keep obsessive fans updated about their menial activities. A scarily invasive and unnecessary expansion of our already celebrity saturated culture. So I was understandably horrified when I was told in my first week of a supposedly serious journalism course that we would be having a lesson devoted to Twitter and that we should all get ourselves signed up straight away. My protest was shamefully short lived and by the second week of term I was a fully signed up tweeter, albeit with no tweets and an embarrassingly small number of followers.
Twitter had “helpfully” given me twenty random people to follow, one of which was Lily Allen. It is impossible not have heard something about the online ranting of Allen; self pitying blogs and up to the minute tweets of her movements. I was surprised to see when I logged on to delete Lily that her final tweet, posted at 2:04 am on Sep 28th read: ‘I am a neo-luddite, goodbye.’ With a quick goggle search I found that a neo-luddite now means somebody who is opposed to technological progress or change. Did this mean that twitter was changing? It obviously didn’t suit Lilly Allen anymore and this made me all the more intrigued.
Although my own tweets were limited I began to watch the site more closely and attempted to build up a list of contacts who could tell me something other than which club they were going to that night. The timing of my introduction to Twitter could not have been better. Within weeks of my first tentative tweets Twitter rose to prominence with the Trafigura story. The social networking site managed to leapfrog an injunction imposed on the conventional media. It concerned the reporting of information regarding a parliamentary question relating to Trafigura’s alleged dumping of waste on the Ivory Coast. As the Guardian was locked in a legal battle against the super injunction Carter-Ruck were attempting to impose on Trafigura’s behalf, thousands of tweeters were busy piecing together the evidence to reveal the nature of the question which Traifgura were so keen to keep hidden.
There are no sanctions which can be placed on the discussions on Twitter and no limit to the amount of people who can read and add to the information placed on the forum. In one sense this is exciting and ground breaking; a way of everybody being a journalist. Twitter certainly seems to be much less about talking about one self, but discussing, sparking debate and getting answers.
However, there is a frightening side to this. The formation of a mob mentality, especially if the information they are acting upon is not entirely correct and given that you can only tweet 140 characters at a time the likelihood of misinterpretation is high. The theory of crowd sourcing suggests that a crowd can be intelligent even if many of individuals who make it up are not. But I am dubious as whether this is always true. In a recent multiplatform lesson a tweet came up announcing the Lockerbie bomber Al-Megrahi was dead. This was immediately followed by a tweet from our class reiterating this information. The claim turned out to utterly unfounded. It is obvious that in a sense posting incorrect information means that the issue will debated and hopefully the right answer given but that is assuming that somebody on Twitter has their facts correct.
Imagine the possible consequences if Twitter had been at its most utilised during the time when a totally innocent Paediatrician was mistaken as a paedophile and an all out witch hunt ensued. It is true that somebody of slightly more intelligence on Twitter may have pointed out the obvious mistake but how many more of the ignorant would have joined the baying mob?
Despite my reservations I have found myself with the urge to tweet, especially when something of interest in the news makes me angry or excited. However given my limited number of followers debate did not initially get very far off the ground ground. I would often log on to the site to check the trending topics and to read the informative and often humorous tweets of popular tweeters Stephen Fry and Richard Bacon, but I was still very much an observer rather than a participant.
By looking into trending topics more I found that by adding a hash tag (#) before a key word I would be able to interact with other people who wanted to discuss the same topic as me. Others would be alerted to it as it is possible to view page of tweetes related soley to this trending topic. Obviously it depends on whether other people are discussing the issues I wish to but it is simple to search a topic by typing # and the topic into the Twitter search box or to being a trending topic myself. This was a way in which I could engage with Twitter despite my limited number of followers. It means that my tweets no longer feel redundant and that I can use the forum as a way of gauging some sense of opinon on subjects of interest. Using this and the @ prefix, which allows you to send direct messages to people, I can begin to build up a list of useful followers who may provide an excellent journalistic resource for me in the furture.
The link at the side of this blog shows my twitter page and features tweets from those I am following.
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