Social media is just another way to report, take in events

Social media is just another way to report, take in events

by Bill Goodykoontz - Feb. 14, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

For me, the social-media progression was typical.

When I started blogging, my stories seemed long. When I started using Facebook, my blog posts seemed long. Then I started using Twitter, and my Facebook updates seemed long.

Eventually we'll probably be pared down to using telepathy to transmit a single word that will represent our thoughts and moods.

Or not.

Whatever the case, once you really buy into social media, you usually do so in a big way.

Case in point: For the first time in more than 15 years, I didn't have to work on Super Bowl Sunday.

So, like most football fans, I attended a Super Bowl party to watch the New Orleans Saints defeat the Indianapolis Colts. Good friends, excellent food and an entertaining game. Pretty much all you could ask for in a sports-related social occasion.

Naturally, I spent a lot of time tweeting.

Yes. On Twitter, sitting on a couch sending 140-character dispatches into the ether, where those who follow me could read them; I, likewise, could do the same with the messages sent by those whom I follow. Happily, I wasn't sending tweets, as the messages are known, to anyone else in the room; that would have been, you know, sad. We can still talk, after all, and we did.

But social media - Twitter, Facebook and the like - are clearly having an impact on how we experience events, big and small. The Golden Globes spawned a steady stream of updates in January. When Tracy Porter intercepted a Peyton Manning pass in the Super Bowl, so many people were tweeting about it that the service reportedly overloaded for a few minutes. And you can bet the upcoming Academy Awards will leave smartphone users with sore thumbs the next day, as movie fans critique the broadcast and bellyache about the winners and losers in real time.

It's like a virtual party. It's not a substitute for genuine human interaction - no cold beer available on the Twitter universe's Super Bowl celebration, to give one example - but it is a valuable tool, both socially and otherwise. And if you're missing out, well, you're missing out.

Social media is undergoing both an enormous boom in popularity as well as the predictable backlash. The common complaint is echoed in everything involving the Internet, which can be boiled down to these three words: Get a life.

Who cares what you had for breakfast? Why would anyone want to know that your adorable toddler spit up all over Santa's beard? Are we supposed to be fascinated by the fact that you are having a cup of coffee at your favorite shop?

In a word: no. And it's true, there is plenty of navel-gazing involved in social media. It's a free world, after all, and no one can prevent you from posting self-important minutiae. But that freedom is also what's great about services like Twitter and Facebook. For all the seconds of life you waste reading about someone's decision to go with the purple sweater instead of the orange one, you'll more than make up for it in more-valuable interaction.

Take the Super Bowl. As Keith Marder, a real-estate agent living in New York City, put it: "My iPhone feels like a sports bar in the palm of my hand, as opposed to Sarah Palin, who keeps crib notes in hers."

That response, fittingly, was delivered over Twitter, and it encapsulates the experience nicely. Marder, whom I follow on the service, answered a question I have about whether it had changed the way people experience these events, and he also worked in a snarky political comment, all in 140 characters or less. It's fun.

But it's not just fun. Social media is also evolving into a way of reporting - and reading about - quickly developing stories, as well as commenting on them as they happen.

Mark McGuire, a New York sports columnist, said by way of Facebook: "It has certainly changed the way I report things, especially breaking stuff. There is something lost in depth (less time), but the immediacy and interaction are valuable for both the writer and the reader - who, when you think about it, alternate roles."

Again, particularly when it comes to reporting, social media is no substitute for a fully formed story. But it is a convenient way to keep up with news as it's happening, whetting the appetite for the in-depth reporting that will come later.

Ultimately, social media isn't a better form of communication than any other, nor is it necessarily a worse one. It's simply a different one, another source to enjoy and from which to glean information. How can you argue with that?

On Twitter or Facebook, of course, for all the world to see.