You may have seen Twitter in the mainstream media of late. Either from Janis Krums breaking the first pictures of Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson River or, more recently, Steven Fry getting stuck in an elevator and getting more viewers than your average BBC3 sitcom. An increasing number of celebrities like Jonathan Ross, Danny Wallace and Chris Moyles are jumping on the bandwagon too. Perhaps accordingly, UK Twitter website visits jumped by 974%.
You may not ‘get’ Twitter – I didn’t for a long time. There’s a lot of implications of this deceptively very simple concept. It’s fantastic for alerting news outlets to breaking stories. It is not a news source in itself. There, I’ve said it. Many people believe that it signals the end of mainstream media but they’re wrong. Traditional and reputable reporters get the facts checked before broadcasting. They have to but Twitter has no such accountability. Imagine a modern-day Orson Welles on Twitter.
Twitter has recently got me some peanut butter and organised a flashmob snowball fight in Trafalgar Square. Next week it will do something far more worthwhile.
