Breaking News And The Voices Of Twitter

Twitter is a very powerful tool. If you don't know what is, you need to learn about it. My mother says she will never ever share all she does with anyone. Culture has taught her generation not to share any personal or any information with others. The Asian culture has been even more private, they avert eye contact, much less tweet what they ate for lunch.

Today, my generation is doing just that. The point isn't what we had for lunch, or our vacation schedule, but I think it has more to do with building trust. You may ask, "Can't people lie and pose as someone they may like to be instead of who they are?" Yes. It truly becomes increasingly difficult for a person to portray a lie if they tweet, because you hear the voice that lies between the words. The more they tweet the more you learn about the person. Trust or distrust is built. You, can follow or un-follow.

Yesterday, at 3:15 PST Michael Jackson died. He was only 50 years old and seems to have died of an apparent heart attack. I am on vacation in VA at my mothers house and at 5:15 eastern the local news channel 10 reported his death. We were so shocked but being a new twitter' we decided to tweet it and I also posted to Facebook. I then began to verify the news by looking online, TMZ. com reported it also, the only one to confirm it at that early time. LA Times was the next to report it confirmed, followed by the AP and then Fox News. CNN was last to confirm it and even confused the situation by reporting he was in a comma. Along the way, I tried to tweet the latest news as it happened. Twitter was on top of the news, when breaking news happens it was the fastest and first. Filtering to the truth is the only hurdle. I guess, filtering through the truth is always the hardest part of any medium, even in a hard back. The beauty of twitter is you can build trust between you and the people you follow. As the trust is built, you are able to here the "voice" of your friends and know that they will only pass along material that they believe viable and truthful. Twitter provides the fastest vehicle to date. Hearsay could always pose a problem for breaking news, but "real time" events require many voices.