Some quick thoughts on how today’s Soho fire was broken and covered on Twitter.
Firstly this isn’t new. We’ve seen it before. But the mundane nature of it all is interesting – no-one’s saying “omg I’m reporting a fire on Twitter!” They’re just reporting the fire. So too is the scale. There’s not one iconic photo – there are hundreds.
Twitter is not the interesting thing here. This is mass adoption on an attitude and an approach which has been developed through play. People are taking the hashtag system the use for silly games and the “conversation as performance” format and applying it to something serious.
Filtering is an issue, as always, but it’s not that hard. It’s easy to pick out the three irrelevant photos from above. Similarly when the news was breaking and before there was a “proper” news piece it was possible to determine the location quite accurately by looking for patterns in the tweets.
There’s no “how” or “why” here, merely the statement that something happened. But that’s fine. Twitter is about statements that something happened (“what are you doing?”) and there are plenty of other social media tools and environments for answering those questions. Wikipedia, for example, or closer to home (ie, in the same office as me) Help Me Investigate. My point being criticising Twitter for only doing breaking news well is missing the point.
The BBC news coverage kicked in 45 minutes after Twitter which, to be honest, is not bad at all. There’s some good stuff in there with facts that come from building up networks of sources and the reputation to access them. But the photo doesn’t compare. Again, Twitter (along with Twitpic) does the breaking well. BBC are catching up though.
Video from the scene. That’s a new development. Expect to see more of that.