I woke up this morning to multiple CNN Breaking News email alerts and this Tweet from my friend Shona:
http://twitter.com/ShoNuffGlasgow/status/64930766722838529
Obviously I high-tailed it over to @ReallyVirtual, who at the time (around 7am EST) already had 20,000 followers. I wonder how many he had twelve hours ago?
When I checked @ReallyVirtual again before I left the house (around 8am EST) he was at 25,000 followers – 5,000+ in less than an hour. Impressive.
Now I’m at work and while Twitter.com seems to be displaying the wrong numbers, Hootsuite has @ReallyVirtual‘s follower count at 31,783 – 10,000+ new people in less than two hours. Whoops, now it’s past 32,000.
http://twitter.com/#!/ReallyVirtual/status/64925589223649280
The only coherent thought I can put together right now is that social media must, on some level, be forcing accountability and making it harder to….censor details from the public. I’m not big on conspiracy theory, but I acknowledge that there are certain filters installed in American media. Yes, this “censorship” may be deemed necessary under the guise of safety, but I don’t like knowing that what I hear on CNN is probably not exactly what happened.
I really think social media is:
- Revolutionizing the journalism industry
- Forcing a level of accountability and transparency in media that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.
Hell, Twitter was the first place to report Osama’s death. “Twitter was faster, more accurate, and more entertaining than any other news source out there.”
https://twitter.com/#!/keithurbahn/status/64877790624886784
Hot damn, indeed.
Eleanor K. Dowling 