Vicariously, I tweet (while the whole world dies)

Posted: June 15th, 2009 | Author: Panos Karageorgakis | Filed under: Culture, Social Media, Twitter, Uncategorized | Tags: people, Social Media, Twitter | 2 Comments »

Time is precious, so I’ll skip the intro and get straight into the point: the Internet is the new television and people love to feed on other peoples’ disasters. Mix these two ingredients together and you have the vicarious social media users feeding on the world’s disasters in real time while being able to participate in the retransmission of the sad news. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner, television is no match to the new media.

There you have it, that’s the whole article summarized in one small paragraph. You can close this window now and go re-tweet this post. Or, maybe you do have a little bit of time to spend on actually reading an article besides its headline. If that is the case, read on.

We grew up watching TV

The Internet is a big thing now, but most of us grew up without it. Television, on the other hand has been the dominating media throughout our lives and we all had the joy of watching the news live on our TV set. Of course the term “news” is really a vague thing here since today the news on TV is nothing more than opinionated people who are getting paid to criticize politicians (and everybody else) while arguing with each other from within their small “windows” in the TV screen.

Now, since few people really care about politics and the good news either bore people or make them envy each other, TV people managed to keep the people alert (and thus increasing their profit) by portraying all sorts of misery, sickness, disaster and perversion that exists in every corner of our little universe we call Earth. Apparently, people fancy watching how other people were killed, murdered, injured or generally got involved in a nasty situation while they themselves are enjoying the comfort of their sofa and are eating pop corn.

“A hurricane killed a dozen of people“, “A mother murdered her son“, “Earthquake in X place – bodycount still going on“, “Serial killer maniac kills 20” and the list goes on and on and on. Millions upon millions of people sit on their couches every night to watch how the rest of the billions out there are having a hard time staying alive.

Finally, we are not passive TV zombies anymore

Ah, the new era; the Internet, world wide web, social media. The neat thing about social media is that no longer are you a passive receiver of information getting thrown to you via TV, but an active transceiver (transmitter / receiver hybrid) able to form your own network of people around the globe to connect to and participate in the endless flow of information (pointers) brokerage (popularity being its currency) that is taking place on Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Everybody is re-posting everybody else’s links to a gazillion of supposedly interesting blog posts or other media without (hardly) ever reading them. Social media forms the public opinion by counting which articles are getting the most re-tweeting (re-transmission from one user to another).

But the power of social media comes to play when something big is happening at some place of our world, like, for example, the terrorist attacks at Mumbai or the recent Iranian elections incident. Or just when a plane crashes, or an earthquake or wildfire happens. It is only then that social media portrays its value as an awesome tool that allows common people like you and me to post information (text, photo or even video) from the ground zero of every such incident so the world knows first-hand what’s going on in real-time.

Pay attention to they real keywords here: disaster, common people, real time. People are using social media as a tool that connects them to one another so they can transmit information about a disaster in real time. This is nothing less than a live transmission of disastrous news withing the network of users that you are a part of, meaning that you are no longer a passive receiver of the tragic news, but a lively active node in the social graph that gets to re-transmit the bad news to other people.

Yes, lucky social media participant; now you can be the man in the TV breaking news section with the information that the actual number of casualties is 53 and not 51 (according to some other user of course, who got it from another user who read it someplace). You can spend your whole day re-transmitting the information you’re getting from your network to, well, the rest of your network, not only vicariously feeding on the tragedy itself but taking pride in being the newsman in the same time.

It’s awesome.

(Now don’t get me wrong, I do love social media, but not always favor the way people are using them)

---