When Twitter went down to a denial of service attack last week, it became a national news story. But most heard it first via platforms such as Facebook, as people commented about it on their profiles – provoking instant debate about Twitter's merits (less is more) and drawbacks (being spammed by companies who track feeds for keywords).
Twitter's downtime was significant for many, not least because Twitter feeds have become a staple of broadcast news programmes. When information is valued by the speed at which it moves, then Twitter's 140-character text limit means that editors can gather data quickly from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. In short, it is redefining the concept of the correspondent – towards a purer definition than the highly paid representative of a TV or radio station.
Granted, for every Tweet of public interest there are ten thousand chirrups of background noise, but powerful new voices will inevitably appear amongst the established Twitterati. (I'm also keeping my eye – or rather ear – on another site, www.Audioboo.com, which promises to be Twitter's audio equivalent.) Today's news story is not just the output of a journalist and a desk editor; it is modified and supplemented in real-time by countless unpaid correspondents. So the real boon of Twitter and its peers is not following an individual, as some believe, but subscribing to an unfiltered, fast-moving story, often shorn of editorial influence.
Today, the filter or editor must be at the user's end, not the broadcaster's or the publisher's, and that is a radical turnaround in terms of how information is collected, disseminated and consumed. Gone is the one to many, broadcast, Reithian concept of news; today's editor is in the home, on the desktop, or in the phone. Some news stories are given their impetus by the globally distributed weight of popular interest behind them, and so many of the most interesting stories break and run outside of the broadcast media, and are tracked by their own dedicated communities.
One such example is http://joelfightsback.com (Twitter #jfb), where thousands of people are following one filesharer's fight against the US music industry as it sues him for millions of dollars. Such stories rapidly become memes – self-replicating, self-propelling patterns of behaviour that spread out across the Internet with an unstoppable momentum of their own, propagated across The Cloud of social networks, from Facebook to YouTube, via Bebo and Second Life.
For some people, companies and organisations this is an opportunity, while for others it is a nightmare. Ask the shareholders of United Airlines, the company whose baggage handlers famously broke one musician's guitar. The incident was immortalised in song in a YouTube video watched by millions and reported the world over.
Once upon a time a story could be spiked at source, but now news is not just in The Cloud, it IS The Cloud. It is no surprise, then, that the Government's so-called 'Twitter Tsar' (or 'Chief Twit' as I prefer) issued lengthy guidance to MPs recently about the use of Twitter and other social networks. In these sticky, Brown-hued times, the Government was inevitably slammed for producing a lengthy, bureaucratic document about a 140-character text service, but in fact the advice was sound. After all, today's thoughtless tweet is tomorrow's damaged career or tanking share price.
All of this is implicit in an Offcom report, published this week, which suggests that the transformation in consumer attitudes to new media is being revealed by the recession. The report reveals that spending on information technology (including TV, the Internet and mobile telephony) is now second only to food in terms of importance: people are finding their savings elsewhere.
It also finds that 19 million people, or 50% of UK Internet users, visit Facebook, and 46% of 25-34 year olds have a social network profile of some kind (as do 35% of 35-54 year olds).Ladies and gentlemen, we are not just in The Cloud, we ARE The Cloud.
Chris Middleton
