Good Idea, Bad Idea - Getting Your News From twitter

Good Idea - News From twitter


I personally don't like to read or watch the news. However, I very much like to know what's going on in current events around the world. A few months ago, I discovered the answer: twitter news. I follow CNN Breaking News (cnnbrk) and our local news station (cfnews13). The big plus is that I know what's going on with very little effort. I like to say "I get all my news in 140 characters." When people ask me "Did you hear about the tropical storm over in the Philippines?" I can say "Yeah, at least 18 dead. Wow." Especially as a teacher (when I'm not on summer vacation. How's work going for everyone?) its good for me to have a little idea what's going on since kids ask really random questions a lot.

Bad Idea - cnnbrk


There are three major problems with only getting your news on twitter. The first is that essentially, you're only getting the headlines of a story. If someone wants to have a discussion about any of this stuff, I can't really participate. Well, I make stuff up and pretend I know more, but I don't actually. For example, I saw this on cnnbrk yesterday:

Deaths of Coppell, Texas, mayor and daughter rules murder-suicide

The first problem is that this tweet actually doesn't make any sense. The commas are in the wrong place. I assume what they meant was "Deaths of Texas mayor, Coppell, and daughter ruled murder-suicide" but that's not what they put, so I could be wrong. They could mean that the death of the Coppells were ruled murder-suicide by a Texas mayor and his daughter. Apparently this mayor listens to his daughter more than his cabinet. Also, do mayors have cabinets?

Anyways, the point being that if anyone brought this topic up, that is the extent of the information I have about the topic. I can't really have a discussion with them. Leads to a lot of me tricking other people into giving me the information about the topic without admitting I don't know anything about it (which if you think about it, is an even better way to get news). Don't get me wrong, I enjoy making people think I'm involved and participating in a conversation when actually I'm just letting them talk (I do it to my wife all the time, and she still doesn't know)(well, she does now because she's reading this over my shoulder).

The other big problem with only getting my news from cnnbrk is that its really repetitive. For example, a couple months back when that earthquake killed a bunch of people in Haiti, I was pretty convinced that Mother Earth was trying to rip us all back into the depths of herself because cnnbrk put up a story about another earthquake ever 4 hours or so. Seriously, there were like 30 earthquake stories in a month. It was crazy. Right now, 32.67% of their posts (I did the math)(by which I of course mean I didn't actually do anything except guess then make it look precise by adding 2.67% to my guess) are about the Gulf oil spill in some way. As a person living in Florida (and no, that does not make me a "Floridian") the spill is kinda important to me, but I'm sick of hearing about it. We get it, the Gulf of Mexico is doomed. We'll be cleaning up this spill for the next 50 years. The ecosystems of that area will be completely obliterated and take lifetimes to recover. It sucks. But really, I'm sick of hearing about it. There's not much I can do to help even if I wanted to (which I don't so much).

Plus, they NEVER put up good stories (by which I mean the actual meaning of "good", as in positive or uplifting). I know this is a go to complaint about all news mediums, but its more pronounced on twitter since there's no room in 140 characters for fluff pieces. Basically, cnnbrk would have you believe we're in a post-apocalyptic world with a corrupt government out to take over the entire world through war and deception while the planet itself is trying to destroy us all, but we still have occasional sporting matches of various kinds, but all of them are very important and memorable.

Well, that's it for this week. And just for fun, check this out: http://therevolvinginternet.com/ WARNING: This link is completely unrelated to my post and may cause motion sickness, irritation, annoyance, nausea and trippy altered states of consciousness.