This post is mostly a pointer to an excellent piece I just saw on ReadWriteWeb, called “Did Twitter Really ‘Outshine’ the Mainstream Media?”. I continue to love this site and its thoughtful commentary. The long and the short of it? Twitter can tell you about the earthquake first, or even help survivors communicate with the outside world and get help. But it can’t tell you the details, the scope of the disaster, or the long-term impact. I’m getting really tired of triumphalists claiming that tools like Twitter are effective replacements for the real, on-the-spot news coverage that requires more than 140 characters a go. And it’s more about self-agrandisement than anything else’ the belief that the people with the cell phones and the Twitter accounts are, by definition, the best chroniclers of important events. Rarely do I read Twitter love poems that effectively make the case that the poet learned more about an event from Twitter’s microbursts than could have been, or was gleaned from longer-form text, audio, or video.
Um yeah. Take it away, ReadWriteWeb
