Twitter Breaks News First, Often Makes It Up

Mediabistro led its newsfeed today with praise for a Twitter user who broke the story of Whitney Houston’s death an hour before the Associated Press did. The story began:

Twitter has long-established itself as the ‘go to’ place for breaking news, and this has never been so clearly demonstrated following the sad passing of music superstar Whitney Houston on Saturday.

Other celebrities whose sad passing I recall Twitter been the first to mention include Cher and Zach Braff, both of whom are still very much alive. If Twitter is anyone’s go-to place for news about anything, they are courting rampant misinformation. A network on which any user can post any claim they want is not a news service, it’s a rumor mill.

That is exactly the way Twitter functioned in the case of Whitney Houston’s death. The tweet that “broke the story” was from user @BarBeeBritt, and said only, “Is Whitney Houston really dead?” News reports, by their very nature, do not take the form of questions. There isn’t supposed to be any uncertainty about the essential facts of the story; it’s only news if you’ve confirmed the story with a reliable source and you’re certain that you’re not playing an inadvertent hoax on the public.

If CNN functioned as Twitter does, an anchor would come back from commercial break, look squarely into the camera and say, “We think Katy Perry might have been crushed by an anvil this morning. If anyone knows anything about this, please send us an e-mail.” If that ever happened, or the New York Times ever ran a story along the lines of “Australian Possibly Engulfed by Giant Fireball: Will Confirm/Deny for Tomorrow’s Edition,” I hope that a mob of angry, truth loving citizens would grab torches and clubs and destroy the infrastructure of the organization. Then, when all the media goes that way, we can just rely on a nationwide game of telephone to disseminate every fact-like piece of possibly-information.

Yeah, Twitter was the first to mention the story of Whitney Houston’s death, but speed cannot possibly be the only criterion we have for what constitutes the go-to source for breaking news. There’s got to be a place for reliability. Thirteen minutes after @ BarBeeBritt’s tweet, user @AjaDiorNavy tweeted, exactly thus: “omgg , my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in tub . such ashame & sad :-( “

That actually counts as information, but the trouble is that there’s no way of knowing that at the moment that it’s tweeted. On Twitter, anyone could have said that about any celebrity just to get attention or cause a stir, and many have. I expect that when someone sees mention of a significant event on Twitter, his first impulse is to turn on the television or check a professional news website. And if a person doesn’t do that, but just takes whatever has been tweeted at face value, he is disturbingly naïve and gullible.

The old saying applies about a stopped clock being right twice a day. But also, a stopped clock will tell you it’s eleven o’clock long before it actually is. It’s easy to be the first on a story; it’s not so easy to get it right. I’d rather wait a little while for news that is relevant, accurate, and thorough, and I’m much more likely to focus my attention on the media outlet that misinforms me least often, rather than on the one that informs or misinforms me most quickly.

It was forty-two minutes after the tweet by @AjaDiorNavy that the Associated Press used Twitter to break the story by indicating that the news of Houston’s death came from her publicist Kristen Foster. Forty-two minutes past hearsay and fifty-five minutes past the intimation of rumor. I know that the world moves fast these days, but is one hour really too long to wait for information that’s been vetted by an organization whose very purpose is to provide the public with news? Is there no lower limit breaking point at which the rapid speed of the news cycle is no longer worth its resulting unreliability? Personally, I think we should have hit that point long before anybody had the gall to describe Twitter as the go-to source for anything other than rumor and idle chatter.

Blackout

It’s good to know that even the chief executive of Twitter uses Twitter to say stupid things.

Fortunately, the mass of public support for the internet blackout in opposition to SOPA built until Wikipedia’s awareness of it hit a breaking point and Jimmy Wales saw fit to make the internet’s massive user-generated encyclopedia the largest participant in the protest. Unfortunately, in response to efforts to goad Twitter into joining as well, Dick Costolo said via tweet: “That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

Well maybe, Dick, but not in this case since closing a global business demonstrates exactly what the outcome would be of letting that single-issue go uncontested. It’s not like this is just some eccentric webmaster’s pet cause. The SOPA legislation, if it were allowed to pass, would threaten the very existence of innumerably many sites on the internet. Its overbroad language makes Wikipedia potentially culpable if people ever fail to attribute quoted sources in articles, and threatens to punish Twitter for facilitating piracy if anyone tweets a link to a bit torrent, or the Pirate Bay, or an embedded video of copyrighted material.

The punishment for either site on the SOPA model could be that an entertainment company files a complaint prompting the domain owner to pull the entire site off the web practically immediately. That would look an awful lot like a blackout, except one that wouldn’t end without a great deal of legal wrangling, much less after twenty-four hours. That’s a consequence that people ought to be confronted with directly. The blackout that begins tonight is not just an impotent protest designed to outrage and inconvenience internet addicts. It addresses a single issue, but the single issue is not SOPA, but rather the witch-hunt mentality that threatens to dominate anti-piracy activism and legislation.

As long as that mentality persists, the very existence of such global businesses as Twitter and Wikipedia is in danger. To not clearly and unequivocally address that particular single-issue is foolish, and so is Dick Costolo himself for dismissing out of hand that bit of national politics that is most important to his company and to the landscape of the internet in which his business operates.

Killing Not Just Newspapers, But News

Nielsen released its report yesterday on how Americans spend their time online, and most of the extensive media coverage seems to be focusing on how popular their research shows Facebook to be. Apparently there was some doubt about that prior to yesterday. This study tells a much larger story than that, however. Focusing on the social media aspect of it seems like a strange bit of rhetoric, and an impulse to exploit the angle that news outlets assume will generate the most attention. Social media and blogs together comprised almost a quarter of people’s time spent online, but it was not the largest category. That remains the miscellaneous category, but let’s not pull punches here, it’s porn. The smallest share of time online goes to news, at 2.6 percent.

That’s a significant piece of information at a time when the internet is said to be killing newspapers, with even television media having a difficult time keeping up with changing landscape. But if society as a whole is devoting only one fortieth of its time spent online to learning about current events, I wonder if that calls into question the assumption that traditional news media are failing because of competition from convenient, cheap, high volume online sources of news. Other analyses have indicated that overall readership of established news agencies is in decline, not just readership of their print formats. It seems that it has always been assumed that this readership was dispersing to other sources from which they gathered the same volume of information that they used to consume, but I expect that that would be difficult to prove empirically. To me, these new numbers support an alternative interpretation: that people are opting out of information-gathering altogether, and that established news media are losing ground not to competition, but to distraction.

The existing narrative reflects what I think is an unfortunate and all too common perspective that all change is positive change. Letting that perspective go unquestioned allows us to sacrifice the best of what is currently available to us, either because the best of what is emerging is thought to outweigh it or because preserving anything against the onslaught of social or technological change is deemed a lost cause. The optimistic outlook on current trends in news consumption is evidently that there is a greater volume of reporting, a greater diversity of opinion, and a greater ease of access. That’s hardly all there is to the story, though. A greater volume of reporting doesn’t mean much if the sources of that reporting are devoid of the resources that might otherwise encourage a fuller investigation and a higher quality of reporting. A greater diversity of opinion is hardly progress if it reflects a devaluing of objectivity and a tendency of people to choose the sources of their news based on a preexisting agreement with the outlet’s perspective. Greater ease of access is barely significant if fewer people are choosing to access the most significant information that is available to them.

Of course, I don’t know that any of these trends are truly dominant. I am confident, however, that there is far too much optimistic assumption about the character of American audiences, and far too much dismissiveness and acceptance of powerlessness among those who might be in a position to affect positive change in consumer behavior. Much of the media seems content to fawn over social networking sites, curve their reporting on topics of much broader significance around a sense of awe at their popularity, wrongly declare them to be the drivers of foreign revolutions, and so on. The cultural position of Facebook, Twitter and the like is crucially important, but I would love to see a lot more analysis of its causes and effects, and a basic willingness to criticize and resist.

As far as I’m concerned, the story to be taken away from the Nielsen report is not that Facebook holds irreversible cultural dominance, but that an enormous portion of the American public enjoys masturbation in its multitudinous forms, and hates information and critical thinking. And as much as that drives frivolous use of social media and a resistance to hard news, it also may inform the existing news media’s response to such trends, so that their diminished quality and misplaced emphasis drives nails into their own coffins.

Socializing Online Without Wanting To

In last week’s New Yorker, there was an article about online dating, exploring its origins, its multiple iterations, and its widespread relevance in the modern world. The author, Nick Paumgarten, points out that “For many people in their twenties, accustomed to conducting much of their social life online, it is no less natural a way to hook up than the church social or the night-club-bathroom line.” This is certainly true to my experience. I see nothing unusual, shameful, or frightening about meeting a person through online communication, and I can perceive some definite advantages to online dating. But at the same time, I despise an excessive reliance on the internet for social exploration and interaction. I do not have a Facebook or Twitter account, and I steadfastly refuse to get drawn into any such trend, even though it is increasingly clear that the virtual ubiquity of these sites threatens to put me at a distinct disadvantage in some contexts.

Not that any external factors are necessary to put me at such a disadvantage. I’m just no damn good at meeting, interacting with, and relating to most other people. That may seem like the sort of characteristic that ought to push a person straight towards social networking technology, but I think that my resistance to it and my own social impediments are both grounded in similar aspects of my personality. I have high standards for my personal relationships and for the sort of people I interact with. I do not seek out casual acquaintanceships, and the fact that I desire a strong element of earnestness and commitment in even the most basic friendships evidently makes me intimidating at the outset of any social interaction. It probably goes a long way towards explaining why people who are purportedly very fond of me and very interested in me never seem to call me on the telephone, even when they themselves bring up the subject of further contact. I think I appear inaccessible, and that that makes people uncertain of how to reach out to me and secure my interest when we are not meeting in passing. And when we are not, the difficulty is that one or both of us must put forth some serious effort at making a connection. Not so with online communication or text messaging.

Callback

There was an article posted to Cracked.com yesterday, that I think is important reading. Naturally, I would think that, because it recalls a post I made to this blog in February. The Cracked author, Mark Hill, however, puts me to shame in that his piece, in that site's fashion, makes a very systematic presentation of his points, drawing on extensive research.

But regardless of exactly how the topic is presented, it is good just to see anyone questioning the asinine media narrative about the socially transformative power of new media. It is good to see anyone making an effort to take Twitter, Facebook, and Western egos down a notch or two. It is disheartening when I can go many weeks without seeing anyone take a rational view on subjects like this, and so it is downright inspiring when someone finally does. There is a conflict present here between a logical assessment of surrounding circumstances and self-aggrandizing, delusional optimism about our own effectiveness in global developments. And of course, eschewing reason in favor of the comforting belief that our mundane activities are inspiring populations and toppling governments only serves to retard our motivation to do more, to put activity behind our activism, and to do a bit of self-sacrifice for the good of others. Why bother if your conspicuous consumption of technology is doing the work for you? Well it isn't, as I pointed out in February, and as The New Yorker pointed out before that, and as Mark Hill very astutely pointed out yesterday.

Will more rational people contribute to this discussion in time? I am earnestly hopeful that prominent writers and commentators will work to tear down this foolhardy conviction that our impersonal, overly casual social activities are good enough to start revolutions. Raising questions about that assumption in the minds of the broader population could constitute a crucial breaking point. We need desperately to break in favor of a clearer understanding of what gives real value to human activity. As it is, this absurd, poorly thought out narrative is making us lazy and self-righteous, and that is a truly poisonous combination.

Stick to the Character Limit

In advance of the current issue, The Atlantic Monthly has changed its Letters to the Editor section. Comments are now printed in a more broadly conceived section called "The Conversation," which, as James Bennet explains in the Editor's Note for May, "is an attempt to more fully express the widening range of reaction to our work." That is to say that there is a much greater diversity of media through which one might comment on a piece of journalism, and The Atlantic now prints traditional letters to the editor alongside blog comments, poll results from TheAtlantic.com, and so on.

By and large, I find this to be an admirable way of extending the dialogue that might grow out of the writing in the magazine without giving short shrift to anyone who tries to express their insight in what is arbitrarily identified as the wrong place. That said, I think there are wrong places - media that ought not be included, and I was appalled to see that among the meaningful and articulate commentary, one tweet had been transcribed and printed in the pages of an esteemed, historic magazine. It read: "I love the 'Letters to the Editor' part of The Atlantic where they let the writers respond. SO MUCH GLORIOUS CATTINESS."

Perhaps this is appreciably amusing, and perhaps it comments on the nature of the discourse that tended to fill the newly renamed section. But anything that's one hundred forty characters at an established maximum is severely limited in how amusing it can be, and debilitatingly limited in how insightful or poignant it can be. The main impression that I get from the above tweet is that it seems like it's just somebody's off-the-cuff, knee jerk commentary. It seems like something that somebody might have simply said aloud to a friend while reading the magazine, not a series of thoughts that somebody took the time to formulate and carefully express. The latter is the only thing that deserves to be put into print.

But of course, my reaction to the tweet printed in "The Conversation" is my reaction to every tweet I'm likely to run across. They all strike me as just being part of somebody's unfiltered and unrefined stream of consciousness, because of course that is what they all are. That is specifically what Twitter is an outlet for, and it has no more place in "The Conversation" than a word from somebody who is simply passing through the room has in an actual ongoing conversation.

The tweet printed in The Atlantic is a perfect example of that. The word "love" is used in it in such a way as to actually denote almost complete detachment. Neither is it used sarcastically nor does it indicate genuine affection, of the sort that would make one want to give something back to the object of it. It is "love" in a sense that is almost unique to the internet, and no doubt endemic on Twitter, in that it is expressed in pleasure at simply letting something happen while you stand as an anonymous observe to it, neither contributing to nor mitigating its persistence.

More than that, anything that uses the word "glorious" in such a casual, colloquial, and borderline meaningless way should not be taken seriously. Is "glorious" really the best word that could have been used here? Does the cattiness the tweeter refers to actually confer something triumphal, something magnificent? Or would it be better to simply call it something like "pleasant"? I won't pretend to never use words like "glorious" in such exaggerative, overly-emphatic contexts when speaking to friends, but I would never write like that. And that is just the problem. The Atlantic is a magazine. It is a piece of literature. It is not idle talk, and there should be a distinction between the two.

It depresses me every time I see things like twitter further validated in traditional media. Does no one else perceive the absurdity of hearing a news presenter say "You can tweet at us," or of seeing a 134 year-old magazine print a comment IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? Does no one else think that this sort of thing robs us of self-respect as a society? It seems to me that it is all an effort at inclusiveness in building a dialogue, but that fact, as I see it, is that including the largest number of voices possible tends to reduce the number of actual ideas being shared. We shouldn't strive to make room for the words of people who haven't really thought things through.

But everywhere I look, we seem to go on reducing the level of discourse, and I am left to wonder: Will there ever be such a volume of pablum in the media that we reach a breaking point that changes and compartmentalizes the ways in which we communicate, or will this go on indefinitely, until the entire conversation is presented in one-sentence increments, with every third comment being LOL or WTF?

Other Views on the Below

I continued to follow the Buffalo rebranding story after my comment last night, and I'm pleased to see that many others are recognizing it as terrible, if for somewhat different reasons. There is an excellent tearing-down of it at WNY Media. The article is very thorough and well-thought out, despite not addressing the major issue that I expressed about it in my post yesterday.

The WNY Media piece also brings up a small meme that spread over Twitter in response to the press release, using the hash tag buffslogan to suggest satirical alternative brands for the city. Scrolling through those posts turns up a handful of real winners, like:

“Buffalo: Your city’s unemployment is low because of our people.”

“Buffalo: Come see what the rest of the country is laughing at.”

“The city that never wakes.”

“Buffalo: You come for the wings. You leave shortly afterwards!”

“You’re always fifteen minutes from being fifteen minutes further away from here.”

“Buffalo: Coming soon.”

“Buffalo: We’re here, fuck it.”

And there’s definitely something to be said for this contribution: “But seriously, Buffalo, no one cares what your slogan is. They just want to not be sad as a result of their visit.”

The satirical treatment of this topic also came in the form of a sendup of the video that came out alongside the unveiling of the brand. The video at that link makes some very amusing comments, but ultimately I feel that it gets away from itself as it goes on. Still, it’s really nice to see anyone doing satire about Buffalo, because laughter really is a wonderful way to address problems.

I remember that when I had just discovered Mike Polk’s absolutely brilliant Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Videos, I searched for Buffalo on Youtube, wondering if anyone had attempted similar satire of this similarly crumbling rust belt town. What I found instead was several doting tribute videos, many of them emphasizing Buffalo’s sports fandom as an admirable feature of the city’s very character, and as something that proved it to be a great place to live. But it has long been my feeling that sports fanaticism is a direct side-effect of living in a faded, downtrodden place. Knowing that there isn’t much else to be proud of or to hope for, you channel all of your hope and positive spirit into the performance of sports teams. But that’s just another form of self-delusion.

Apparently a couple of radio personalities on Buffalo’s sports talk station WGR devoted a sizable portion of their air time this morning to the discussion of the video that Visit Buffalo Niagara had released, which they derided for its failure to mention either the Bills or the Sabres. Now, granted these are sports talk guys, so as a rule, that is all they think about, but still this is a truly asinine complaint. As terrible as the For Real campaign is, that’s the one place where it’s got it right. Buffalo needs to put focus on different things – things that don’t strike us with the knee-jerk reaction of stadium excitement – in order to broaden its appeal beyond the reach of people who actually live here. Nobody’s going to travel to Buffalo, NY to see an NFL or NHL game. They can do that at home or in a city with more to offer besides.

Tragically, though, Buffalo is the sort of place where some very vocal people, though complaining about something that has certainly earned criticism, will attack it from exactly the wrong angle. The WGR personalities, and no doubt many other locals, look at a very bad piece of creative marketing, and decide that what’s wrong with it is that it is too high-brow, too distant from the familiar. The last thing we need is to keep on channeling our energy through the same useless outlets.

Buffalonians need to come to a breaking point in their understanding of what they’re up against, but some of them have much farther to go than others. Despite all of my criticisms, I’ll say this for Visit Buffalo Niagara: at least they’re actually trying something new. They just fucked it up, that’s all.