Mumbai attacks reported all over Twitter
Twitter has again demonstrated its utility in terms of reporting world events as they happen. The current example is the recent and ongoing attacks on civilians in Mumbai by unidentified assailants (at time of writing).
Image credit: CBC News
The advantage presented by Twitter is the speed of reportage by those actually in the middle of events as they unfold. For official media, it takes time to assemble teams of reporters and gear and then actually get to the location. In the meantime, the situation has changed and the immediacy and accuracy of coverage is lost.
For more about Twitter reporting Mumbai attacks, see CNN, Sky News (reporter actually microblogging events), this blog by Matthew Ingram (coverage of this situation and past ones documented on Twitter such as the China earthquakes and California forest fires), and the related tweets popping up in the MicroUpdates stream.
For anyone tracking events in Mumbai through Twitter search by simply searching on Mumbai or using a more precise search (as suggested by Om Malik) they would have seen an avalanche of tweets documenting the attacks. In fact, within the last 10 minutes Twitter search is telling me that another 436 tweets have been posted based on Om’s search.
This is quick and sounds revolutionary and a step forward for finding out what’s happening in the world. However, …
The other side of the story is that many of these tweets are not actually reporting the attacks themselves (or the aftermath), they are instead discussing how people use Twitter to report the attacks. See here, here, and here for examples.
While it is true that social media tools like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube are changing how we report and find out about the world, they also generate a lot of news about the tools themselves. And will continute to do so while they remain novel and new uses of them emerge.
So while the access to information about an event in the first-person is now accessible (and from multiple perspectives), we as consumers are required to separate the discussion about the tools reporting these events.
How big a problem is this?
Update: Here are a couple of other links looking at this issue:
