Twitter Jumps the Shark
“In The Age Of Realtime, Twitter Is Walter Cronkite.”
This is the headline TechCrunch posted on Nov 27, 2009. Real-time news is the future, without any doubt, but Twitter gives us a lot more than that. It gives us bogus links, bogus information, bogus opinions and bogus noise. In this age, being the first with the story is not the highest virtue. Considerations of accuracy are more important than ever. LA Times writer Mark Milian notes that the role of journalism is evolving from reporting the news to dispelling rumors recently at the 140 Characters Conference.
It isn’t that Twitter or any realtime medium couldn’t eventually become the ultimate media source for getting information. But to say it is right now is a little premature. Assuming there are 2.5 million active accounts on Twitter, recall there are an estimated 111,100,000+ households in the U.S. Even television took twenty years to become a common household object after it first became commercially available.
Imagine a dozen people crowding around a computer to hit the refresh button on Twitter incessantly for two hours for serious news. Let’s just say, we’re not there yet, and perhaps, neither do we want to be.
– Stella Tran
