On a recent Sunday night, the Twitter stream was a sight to behold. Ordinary folks like you and me spread the news like wildfire: Osama bin Laden was dead. Then, we used social media to do what we like to do — congregate around a current event to gossip, speculate, celebrate, crack jokes, argue, and Jesus Juke. At least that’s what my Twitter and Facebook apps were showing me.
Along the way, several people declared that TV as a news medium was dead along with bin Laden. See, the breaking news had been confirmed via Twitter while the President’s television address was still being prepared. Never mind that an alert on broadcast TV was what got a lot of people talking about the mysterious presidential address in the first place. Or that the news media (many of whom are employed by television networks) were notified of the impending address via e-mails and other missives from the White House. Some concluded, “TV wasn’t first; Twitter was! TV is dead; long live social media!”
I don’t think that’s quite right. At least not for me.
In terms of news, I’m much more concerned with what I learn, not when I learn it. So while the tweet, “Osama bin Laden is dead,” by someone whose bio says she’s a producer for ABC News can travel with lightning speed online, this dispatch is still lacking.
What’s the context? What’s the rest of the story? Is this truth or rumor? How do we feel about this development? What happens next?
For many of us, the search for the answers to these questions begins with turning on the TV. Or at the very least, we close our social media apps and open a Web browser hoping for words and images that will offer some much-needed substance and meaning to the 140-character bottle rocket that just flashed across the screen.
If we want to say that Twitter and Facebook are the preeminent platforms for breaking news stories, I’m OK with that. But as long as we maintain even a passing interest in the actual details and implications of those stories — rather than just their headlines — TV isn’t dead. (Secret: Neither is print.)
Electronic media is not a winner-take-all sprint in which the fastest runner (social media) gets a gold medal, and everyone else (TV, radio, the World Wide Web, etc.) gets the firing squad. Electronic media is more like an ecosystem in which each medium has the opportunity to exploit its strengths — speed, depth, accessibility, credibility, and so on.
Just because social media platforms are starting to come alive doesn’t mean TV is dead. It just means that our creation and consumption habits are changing. As weird as it sounds, those kinds of changes are something we’d better get used to.
