Legal Commentary

What I don’t get about twitter

By David Canton

I don’t get why people feel the need to know everything immediately.   This has puzzled me for years.  Many years ago, TV stations bragged about breaking news on their station first.   When CNN came along, it was a big deal that we saw it on CNN first.  Now we see tweets commenting on how events are tweeted before they hit CNN.

What we saw on CNN was in essence reporters’ real time collection of information – before they had a chance to understand or edit.  Sometimes literally hours of raw feed that could be summarized in a couple of minutes.  On twitter news takes the form of small snippets of info, often passed along like gossip, with more emphasis on speed than accuracy.

Frankly, unless its something I need to know right now to act upon (the intersection of 1st and Vine is blocked due to a water main break – take an alternate route) I’d rather wait for a brief, accurate summary and some reflective comment, rather than take the time to wade through the firehose of raw data and speculation.

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on December 15, 2009 (boomark / email).