Communications and Media

In her essay News to Me Twitter and the Personal Networking of News, Kate Crawford (2010) writes about the intrinsic relationship between traditional news mediums and the new age concept of micro-blogging and networking. Instead of simply being an arena to publish ones personal insights, it has become a vehicle for citizen journalism, which can be defined as the act of a citizen, or a group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information (Bowman and Willis, quoted in Crawford 2010 229).

But, despite this changing atmosphere in media and social involvement, I still believe that there remains a wide discrepancy between the legitimization of such sites like Twitter as an accurate source of news. One would be the experiential quality of the messages posted on Twitter. In addition Crawford says, Journalism may be an unnecessarily restrictive framework to apply to these experiential accounts, which often relate an affective, impressionistic moment of what was seen and felt, designed to be shared with a distributed social group (Crawford 2010 240). When Mike Wilson survived a Continental Airlines 737 crash, he tweeted Holy fcking shtI was just in a plane crash This post might inform people of what had happened but it remains a prejudiced scope that questions the intentions of the person involved.

Clay Shirky (2009), in his defense of the print media, says, Print media does much of societys heavy journalistic liftingShirky 2009 online). This and journalisms encompassing quality cannot be completely be conveyed through the limited capacity of Twitters 140-character boards. Though an individual would like to partake in a more democratic news system, Twitter lacks the facility to provide an avenue for it.  Yes, these headlines like Wilsons tweet after surviving the plane crash may serve as a jump-off point to larger news, but in reality, it is not enough.

Also, Twitter users cannot fully be citizen journalists because of  the overarching issue of the breadth of ones online community. Whereas news can be proclaimed through a wide scope, Twitter users can only share their news among their immediate community. For example, a user had become witness to a crime and had tweeted it. Unless this account is re-tweeted, it will never reach the greater public. This news importance solely relies on the reactions of his immediate community. In a sense, it gets filtered out depending on its significance to his followers.

Lastly, the authority of citizen journalists has come to be questioned. As mentioned by Terry Flew and Jason Wilson (2008), there is, among journalists a different kind of citizenry that is developed by their unique understanding of one ideology, a system that doesnt work through anonymity. This authority should be known and found like to prevent a misunderstanding of sources, as exemplified by Twitter activity on the Tehran situation. What most people fail to recognize is that some of the most active tweets about the incident do not come from Iran, but rather on American soil. This changes the atmosphere of the posts completely.

Overall, there might still be some aspects of the site that needs polishing, but for now we cannot argue that it remains as the perfect tell-all of the heart beat of a people.