By Alexandra Radius
In the beginning, Twitter was a social network which helped you to keep track of what your friends were up to. But its success and global notoriety has come from a different type of use. Twitter is now a media in its own right, having proved to be an efficient and (relatively) reliable source of news and insight about events happening all over the world.
One of the most recent examples of this was during the Iran crisis when the traditional media was heavily restricted. Twitter provided the platform for uncensored videos filmed on mobile phones to be broadcast, giving the world a rare glimpse of what many Iranian people thought about the country’s political situation. Another example was during the Bombay terror attacks when people tweeted as a way of contacting their families.
For me, the more quickly we are made aware of these type of situations the better, and the fact that the public can now break the news ahead of AFP or Reuters is a logical evolution, given the immediate and ‘always on’ nature of today’s end-user technologies.
So does this mean that we are looking at the end of the press agency and journalism as we know it today? Even if technology continues to increase the speed at which the news is spread, we will always need credible people to check and corroborate information, after all, the lines between rumours, speculation and truth can be very thin. Twitter is a great tool and plays a vital informative role, but this role can only be a complementary one.
Recently the idea has been put forward that Twitter should win the Nobel Peace Prize for its role during the Iran crisis and why not? The very suggestion will undoubtedly give Twitter and other social networks real recognition as information broadcasters. But tweeting can never replace hard graft, in-depth journalism, especially now that we can read the news on a smartphone, laptop and maybe very soon, a Kindle.
Comments