Great observation from Doghouse Diaries (@willrayraf) h/t Geekosystem.
Oddly, I found out that Osama bin Laden had been killed by accident on the TV of all places. Mostly because the news had preempted a show I wanted to watch.
I felt a wave of nostalgia.
I’ve used Twitter as my go-to for news for years now, e.g. Michael Jackson, Portland boom, Hudson River plane crash, etc.. It’s so rare to see something break on TV first, mostly because I only watch it recorded.
And the only use I have for newspapers anymore is coupons and packing material.
Strange world.
I don’t use it for news. The whole citizen reporter thing and the incidental commentary around it has resulted in some very unfortunate incidents in my country. I do love Twitter though – for me it’s a source of UX and localization research and for tech support (usually broadband or mobile issues). And there’s a whole new way to watch television – with a laptop, following along the commentary using a hashtag. Often the twitterstream is more interesting than the program. I tend to stay away from trending topics.
So you’re on of those mythical users who watches TV and Twitter at the same time. I honestly thought that was a unicorn use case 🙂
What happened re. citizen journalism?
I always apply a skeptical filter to stuff on Twitter, but there’s no better way to confirm you felt an earthquake 🙂
I read the paper on the train, while people around me use laptops and phones. I get an order of magnitude more news than they do. There’s almost never any use case for instant news besides traffic or transit. I thought there was once when I was on the train and a tweet came through as to why it was stopped, before the conductor knew, but the general case now is “last post 23 hours ago train is 12 minutes late” when it was a half-hour late yesterday.
Getting information through twitter is like drinking a milkshake through a birds leg. A very small bird who is probably sick.
I have to go catch a train now. I don’t know if I have to rush.
Pretty sure you can guess how I feel about newspapers. Twitter is limited by whom you follow, which makes it hit/miss for relevance in news or anything.
Late to this post but I happened upon the news via Hulu of all places. I was cleaning out my queue of show’s I had already watched in other places and I saw the title for what I thought was a clip that happened in the past, took me a few moments to realize it was going to be a live stream and that I was watching real time tv.
Ha, interesting little piece of digital serendipity. Like the modern version of my story.