Matthew Ingram: Twitter bears witness to the world

Matthew Ingram, The Globe And Mail’s technology columnist, has advanced a truly exciting idea: namely that microblogging is our first line in the reporting of world events. Before the news stations can get a report out of a location, Twitterers are communicating the reality from a layperson’s perspective. Moreover, he claims, Twitter provides a sort of ‘first-hand account’ of the events that shape our world, and that those who record and study history have new tools to determine what really happened, as it happened. Twitter is our brief, often honest first look at the events that will become the subject of history.

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post