Tuesday, April 28th 2009
Is Twitter the new Morse Code?
Yesterday was the birthday of Samuel Morse, born in 1971 and inventor of Morse Code.
A revolutionary invention, that changed the way the world communicated, Morse Code could be compared to Twitter. The art of getting information across very quickly is what Twitter is all about. The instances where news has been broken via the microblogging service shows the way in which it is playing a central role in our lives, even if we aren’t on it.
When a plane avoided crashing into the Hudson and killing all the passengers on board Twitter broke it to the world, complete with a live action photo of the rescue on Twitpic. What was surprising about this event was that it achieved greater media coverage than other disasters because of its coverage on Twitter. About a month later 50 people were killed in a plane crash in Buffalo and the story received a lot of attention, but nothing in comparison to the hype created by social media surrounding the Hudson plane crash.
Just as we can now share information quickly and easily via various social networking platforms, we unintentionally filter the news, influencing the media as to which stories are more important.
Posted by Tasha on Tuesday 28th of April 2009 at 12:18pm
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Typo made me giggle:
"Yesterday was the birthday of Samuel Morse, born in 1971"
Posted by Len on Tuesday 28th of April 2009 at 12:23pm