Everybody Wants A Piece Of The Pie

[Solo_LTSurvivor]

How Twitter and Facebook Helped Everyone Catch Bin Laden

Social media played a fascinating and surprising role in the event itself as well.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, a man who identifies himself as Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual), a resident of Abbotabad, tweeted about some unusual helicopter activity and the sounds of armed conflict. Several hours later, he connected the events he had witnessed with emerging news reports and tweeted “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.” This strange event brings together two kinds of stories about social media: the technological-determinist story about how social media are allowing democratic political revolutions to take place, and the often-curmudgeonly story about how social media is all about narcissistic self-reporting. If social media means that everybody talks about everything, and that governments and military can’t stop communications from getting out, then we should expect that a momentous historic moment might be blogged, more simply, as something unusual going on in the neighborhood that night.

It’s also noteworthy that, as the Associated Press reported, part of the reason that Bin Laden’s compound came under special scrutiny by the CIA was that it had no phone lines or internet cables. As Ted Striphas, author of “The Late Age of Print,” commented in my Facebook feed, “Amazing to think *not* being wired has become a point of suspicion.” Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry),” added “Who would have thought that going without both would make one more susceptible to being tracked?”

I know, of course, that social media is not the big story today, but this event gives us an opportunity to see how we talk to each other today, and how much our awareness of the world has become more and more about talking to each other.

[Ann]

There's an interesting related article over at Forbes - Twitter is About to Get Bigger. I'd C&P it here, but you might as well go to the real thing as it is full of embedded links you might like to click on and read. 

[Solo_LTSurvivor]

Thanks for posting the link to that article, Ann.  I found it to be quite interesting.

[Ann]

You're welcome!