Though I’m still waiting for video to be posted, CBS Sunday Morning just aired a segment by Nancy Giles that was on par with an Andy Rooney rant in terms of its technological ignorance.
The technology in question was Twitter, which Giles knocked as yet another distraction. She ultimately derided it as something that splits our attention, leaving people a puddle of half-thoughts.
Though Twitter is indeed pitched to its users as a way to “Answer a single question: What are you doing?”, Giles ignores the ways Twitter is actually used (hence the Rooney level of non-research). She doesn’t mention that people can reply to one another. She doesn’t describe the use of hash tags to organize erstwhile strangers around a single topic. She’s oblivious to the potential for viewers of CBS Sunday Morning to immediately, publicly respond to Giles’ segment.
And though it’s a little more technical, she never once explained what every general-interest piece on Twitter has to explain: why a message is limited to 140 characters. The character limit makes sure every message can be sent as a text message. Though most messages are sent from desktops, the uses of Twitter from a mobile device are profound.
An example of how all this comes together, all of which Giles is oblivious to. Let’s say it’s November 2010. A election-monitoring group in northern Virginia has set up a “#nova10″ hashtag to track tweets about voter problems. (A hashtag is any arbitrary term preceded by “#” and is a Twitter feature that organizes all messages sharing that term.) Two hours after polls open in Fairfax Co., Virginia, voters notice irregularities with some voting machines—the machines have frozen, poll workers are rebooting them, but a Republican poll watcher is yelling that rebooting is deleting the first two hours worth of votes.
So voters waiting in line use their cell phones to send messages to Twitter using the #nova10 hashtag. What happens? Factual information is shared and replied to among voters. A political science professor and lawyer down the road at George Mason University see the messages and zip over to the polling station to help smooth out the legal issues. And, if problems escalate, local reporters tracking the hashtag can cover the dispute.
In all, Twitter helped announce a major problem and coordinated its response and solution.
If you think this is all pie-in-the-sky, consider the fact that this not only already happened here during the 2008 Presidential election but also in Pakistan, leading to circumvention of marshal law and ultimately the ouster of Pervez Musharraf.
If only CBS’s Nancy Giles would have bothered to do some research on how Twitter is actually used, she could have put together a story that didn’t leave her sounding like Andy Rooney.
