Monday, May 2, 2011

Practicum Post #6- Julie MacGuidwin

So with the breaking news of Osama Bin Laden being killed, I wanted to see what kind of "coverage" Twitter had of the event. I heard around 9 PM that Obama had a speech prepared for later that night, so I started googling. Within minutes of the announcement that Obama would be making a speech, word spread like WILD FIRE on Twitter about the content. Before any of the news sources (CNN, local news sources, TV news) reported on what was going to be talked about, the information was alllll over Twitter. Most of the posts said "I hear that he's going to be talking about... " Or "Rumor has it...", instead of people confirming that they knew what the speech was about.

I thought this was interesting but I also saw a response of people being kind of upset that the surprise was ruined for them. What really shocked me was how fast the news spread!! Obviously I wasn't looking at other forms of social networking, but I really think that Twitter had a huge part in spreading this news so fast. Even if you googled "Obama speech", there were hundreds and hundred of new Twitter posts coming up every second that made comment about this.

I found this article after googling a bit too, and found that this person came to the same conclusions as me http://www.thelantern.com/opinion/twitter-proves-its-worth-with-bin-laden-coverage-1.2216810. It seems like more people learned about Bin Laden's death on social networking sites BEFORE they even saw the news!
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4 comments:

  1. AlexGMay 2, 2011 at 9:51 PM

    In a Journalism class today, someone was talking about how some guy in Abbottabad tweeting about how he was being annoyed by the sounds of helicopters flying around, later discovering that he was tweeting about the raid as it was happening.

    As I'm writing this I can see that it looks like Liz tweeted something about this on the Twitter Updates box on the right. Interesting read!

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  2. Rachel CousinsMay 3, 2011 at 8:50 PM

    with so many updates on Twitter and them coming in at such a rapid pace did you ever get a little bit overwhelmed? I know that even just from Facebook I started to get a little bit annoyed...

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  3. Jon KirsnerMay 4, 2011 at 4:23 PM

    I personally could not look at twitter for a day because everyone was tweeting the same things. I will admit that some of the jokes were really funny but all the patriotic tweets got so repetitive that i couldn't deal with it. But I will say that twitter is truly an amazing idea. I learned of the news via twitter and I know many of my friends did as well. and whats even more amazing as Julie stated too is that after I saw the news on twitter i went right to cnn.com and nothing was there.

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  4. Noah JaroshMay 4, 2011 at 6:32 PM

    I first learned about this thanks to Twitter. It's really impressive just how quickly information can spread when news this big happens. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't too long ago when news took several weeks to make it state to state and now we get it almost instantaneously. By that point, it seemed like everyone already knew the information before cnn.com and other news sites even had a chance to write up a short post.

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