OPINION: Doctor Who announcement shows Twitter as great for networking, rubbish for news you can trust
It may have been the heat, but I found myself wide awake at 4.30am this morning, so decided to try a bit of an experiment.
There’s been some argy-bargy going on at Laurel Papworth’s blog about whether Twitter has overtaken established media as a news source. Argy-bargy which I’ve been joining in with, I should add.
Laurel’s argument (which I’ll make here deliberately badly for her) is that these days you don’t need the news because we all have such brilliant Twitter networks that we’ll all know someone on the plane that skids off the runway. Or at the very least, know somebody who knows somebody…
So I decided to try to use Twitter to tell me a one fact story – the announcement of the new actor playing Doctor Who, which was due at about 4.35am EDT.
I went to Twitter Search, and it was certainly abuzz. I’d estimate there were about 30 Doctor Who tweets per minute. It’s a good way of feeling that as you lie in bed in Australia, you may not be the only nerd out there.
But here’s the thing. The spammers knew it too. Virtually half of the Doctor Who posts were spoofs, linking to dodgy sites. Each one came from a different Twitter ID and each one consisted of a message along the lines of “Brave move casting Jerry Seinfeld as Doctor Who. See details at…” I even saw Lemmy of Motorhead’s name go past at one point.
So when the Twitters started mentioning the relatively unknown Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor there was no way of knowing if it could be trusted. In the end, the only way of checking was to go back to the traditional media, and see what the BBC was saying.
That said, it was an excellent PR play by the BBC, as Across the Mediaverse notes this morning.
And now the reaction is out there, the Twitterverse is an excellent focus group. It’s quite fun watching the angst scrolling past. And I’ve already picked a couple of observations from the stream that are worth stealing. For one, it is depressign when Doctor Who is for the first time younger than you. And second, maybe that’s why they call it Doctor Who?
[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=bhmWRjo7gKI]
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Everyone freaks when The Doctor changes. Always have, always will. And most will have sophomoric responses like, “The new doctor is an emo asshole!”
As for twitter spam, well, that – like all spam – sucks. Twitter can support but will never supplant more trad news sources.
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Oh, I spoke of Twitter for breaking news, and to bring links to original sources. But the first I heard of a new Doctor Who was on your blog. So da blog beats da Twitter. I have no idea when I will see it in print or hear it on the telly or radio.
Incidentally Heritage media is not traditional media that is available online. It’s newspapers, TV and radio. Heritage.
but whether blog, or Twitter or Facebook – I can GUARANTEE that news will be broken to me first, socially, which I will follow up with a good Google and/or ask my friends THEN traditional media.
YMMV your mileage may vary. 😛
Traditional media referencing social media for Doctor Who stories
Irony there, K-9? 😛
‘Searching’ twitter is using it as a unknown person network, not a social network. have a look at who to trust on Twitter. You are better off following the rabid Doctor Who fans than searching, a few tweets will reveal if they are trustworthy in their fanaticism – heh – who will link you to the Doctor Who blogs and (famous) forums, and who (waiting with mad gleams in their eyes) saw the press release from the Director – at the same time as traditional media did. News is broken by traditional media only? I think not, it’s ambient news now.
By the way, I’m moving my blog from blogspot to wordpress today. (laurelpapworth.com) wish me luck! *waves*
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Good luck with the move. WordPress is a brilliant platform, so it should go like clockwork…
There were a lot of humour moments of mis-direction in the moments leading up to the announcment, and yes, I got rick-rolled just before the announcement.
The real moment for Twitter though is probably going to be the reporting of a non-scheduled world news event. Something unexpected, most likely something involving human tragety and disaster.
Yesterday we were looking at Twitter Vision
http://twittervision.com/
This strangely addictive site combines a map and twitter posts.
I would predicit, if it hasn’t already happened, that soon someone will create a service that would alert people to a sudden increase of twitter traffic in a particular region or a similar topic.
This is where Twitter will be leading the way in news.
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The same mashup technology has also created the excellent Flickrvision too – http://flickrvision.com/ . Well worth a hypnotic ten minutes…