Gary Nickerson, my husband and colleague, offered his acute observations on the relevance of social media in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden's death on his blog yesterday. As an addicted Twitter user and follower myself, I found it to be dead on (pardon the pun). And, for those of you venturing into the social media world, I think you'll find it useful. Check it out:
"May 3, 2011 - In the sixties, we used to say the the "Revolution will not be televised." Of course, that was wrong, as shown especially by recent events. However, the fact is that television has lagged in its coverage of all of those events. If you wanted to keep up to date, you had to follow what was going on from the source via FaceBook and Twitter. Often, these events were more reliably reported on those sources than on television news, simply because they were done on the spot. So, what does this have to do with bin Laden?
Well, it turns out that the first news about bin Laden's death came from an an unknown source in the White House. He or she tweeted about it half an hour before the President was scheduled to speak and a few hours before he actually did speak. From there the news spread virally, as we in the Internet world say, and was shortly fodder for TV and radio coverage. I saw it on FaceBook before I heard it announced on CNN.
The point is that if you want to be able to keep up with the actual news, you need to follow Internet sources. This is true even when it comes to regular International reporting. For example, Al Jazeera, which has no cable outlets but is available on the web, was a better and earlier source of good reporting on the Middle East before CNN International and the networks for quite a while. They simply initially had more and more experienced reporters in place!
But to really keep up, especially with unofficial sources, the raw Internet is still best. "We are all Khaled Said" on FaceBook was the voice of the Egyptian revolution. Libya Ahurra broadcast live from Benghazzi during the uprising in Libya and gave much better and more reliable news that all the regular news sources that were themselves relying on "official" sources.
The lesson of all this is that if you are not plugged into Internet sources, you are likely to be getting yesterday's news even on TV and radio. Yes, the revolution will be televised, but by then it will be old news.
The message is that you can keep up."
Check out Gary's other writings here.
"May 3, 2011 - In the sixties, we used to say the the "Revolution will not be televised." Of course, that was wrong, as shown especially by recent events. However, the fact is that television has lagged in its coverage of all of those events. If you wanted to keep up to date, you had to follow what was going on from the source via FaceBook and Twitter. Often, these events were more reliably reported on those sources than on television news, simply because they were done on the spot. So, what does this have to do with bin Laden?
Well, it turns out that the first news about bin Laden's death came from an an unknown source in the White House. He or she tweeted about it half an hour before the President was scheduled to speak and a few hours before he actually did speak. From there the news spread virally, as we in the Internet world say, and was shortly fodder for TV and radio coverage. I saw it on FaceBook before I heard it announced on CNN.
The point is that if you want to be able to keep up with the actual news, you need to follow Internet sources. This is true even when it comes to regular International reporting. For example, Al Jazeera, which has no cable outlets but is available on the web, was a better and earlier source of good reporting on the Middle East before CNN International and the networks for quite a while. They simply initially had more and more experienced reporters in place!
But to really keep up, especially with unofficial sources, the raw Internet is still best. "We are all Khaled Said" on FaceBook was the voice of the Egyptian revolution. Libya Ahurra broadcast live from Benghazzi during the uprising in Libya and gave much better and more reliable news that all the regular news sources that were themselves relying on "official" sources.
The lesson of all this is that if you are not plugged into Internet sources, you are likely to be getting yesterday's news even on TV and radio. Yes, the revolution will be televised, but by then it will be old news.
The message is that you can keep up."
Check out Gary's other writings here.
