In the tweet of the night

Wallace Stroby ‏Just realized this is the first presidential election night since 1986 I haven't spent in a newsroom. Miss it. Sort of.

DBeyondBorders @wallacestroby Nah, who needs all that congealed pizza?

Wallace Stroby @DBeyondBorders: Stale newsroom pizza = the smell of democracy in action.

DBeyondBorders @wallacestroby: Hunks of that democracy rancidifying in the pit of my digestive system now. You coming to Noircon? I can save you a slice.

Wallace Stroby @DBeyondBorders I'll be there. Enjoy that pizza. It's what makes America great.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The end of Twitter as a source of news

Nothing in recent memory has made me feel better about newspapers than Twitter's reporting of Osama bin Laden's death.

Like much of the world, I learned of bin Laden's death on Twitter, and that initial excitement carried the thrill of a whispered rumor. But that's all it carried. It took me about thirty seconds to realize that nothing I wanted to know about his death — its consequences and ramifications, primarily, but also its circumstances and, secondarily, the reactions in the U.S. of people most affected by the 9/11 attacks — could or would ever be available on Twitter in a form useful to me.

For that I'll have to turn to newspapers, magazines (television, too, I suppose) and their online imitators. So, while social media may be a useful canary in a coal mine for news organizations and for the reading, listening and watching public, they're nothing more than starting points for news. If Twitter offers news, I want something else. I want the story.

***

I am reading or have just read two novels from the 1970s that turn at least in part on disillusionment with the degree to which life has become a big spectacle. One is J.G. Ballard's Crash, and the other is Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, newly available in English translation  from New York Review of Books (and including a blurb from Philadelphia's own Duane Swierczynski).

I thought of both as I read an article in my newspaper about Twitter and bin Laden's death that quotes a social news editor of the Huffington Post thus:

“At one time, they all would have had to go the White House or ground zero or a baseball game. But now people could stay at their houses and be part of this outpouring of emotion and the conversation.”

Ballard would have shuddered — if he didn't laugh his ass off.

***

Just had a chat with two colleagues about the bogus Martin Luther King quotation. Back when Twitter was taken seriously, we would have had to exchange Tweets. But now we could gather together, for real, in person, and talk about how the entire world has been suckered by social media.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011