Not a post about the death of bin Laden
May. 6th, 2011 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mamajoanI don't have anything to say about Osama bin Laden that hasn't already been said. But I will say that it was a pretty surreal night, last Sunday.
I was on Twitter around 9:45pm, starting to think about maybe going to bed, when there came out some tweets saying that President Obama would be holding a press conference at 10:30, topic unknown. So I figured, okay, I'll stay up for that, could be interesting.
But as the minutes went by, and the word spread, it started to sink in how unusual this was. The President calls a press conference for 10:30pm (his time) on a Sunday night, and NO ONE on Twitter knew what it was about -- including any of the many news outlets and political peeps that I follow. One of my Twitter friends posted that she had gotten word that the military base where she works had been bumped up to a higher alert level. I started to get a little worried, and I wasn't the only one. The mood was spreading. Other folks on Twitter were making nervous jokes about going to hide in the bunker, stocking up on bottled water, and so forth. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was desperately trying to find ways to fill up airtime when all he really had to say was "The President is going to say something and we don't know what."
The minutes ticked by, and the WhiteHouse.gov page where they were going to show the live feed of the press conference (with the bland heading "President Obama addresses the nation") was blank. At one point I pulled up the MSNBC live feed and heard one of the anchors say -- I think this was pure speculation though it wasn't clear -- that Obama was hastily revising and editing and re-revising his remarks, hence the delay.
Then, somewhere around 10:20 or 10:25, I think it was, the first tweet came out saying that US forces had killed bin Laden. Well, you can imagine how Twitter exploded on that one! It was all around within moments. Speculation and rumor were running wild. Meanwhile, the "mainstream" news people were shitting themselves (metaphorically ;) ) as they struggled to stick with "We don't know what the president is going to say..." even while the story was blowing up all around them. Some of them finally started to say things like "The rumor we're hearing is that..." but by about 10:50, which I believe was when I called my mom, almost all of the major news outlets were beginning to report it as fact. And by the time Obama actually did come on the air, around 11:10ish, it was anticlimactic, although still amazing to hear it from his mouth.
And then the processing began, on Twitter and elsewhere; and the "celebrations" at the White House and in NYC and here in Boston, college students partying in the streets, and some of us on Twitter talking about why they shouldn't be partying. Someone tweeted that he was on an airplane with a 9/11 widow, that she was sobbing and the entire plane was comforting her. It was a crazy atmosphere all over the internet. I didn't get to bed till after 1am (and I believe that one of my last tweets of that night said something like "Obama just made the announcement and then walked away. He didn't even apologize for keeping us up late on a school night.").
Then I got up the next morning and watched everyone who had already been asleep that night, waking up and going through the same process as they heard the news. That part was weird too.
The way the information moved through Twitter was and is really fascinating to me. The first tweet that came out saying he had it from a reputable source, spread like wildfire; and while most people (at least in my particular part of the Twittersphere) were trying to remain cautious and skeptical, the more it spread the more it had the ring of truth to it. We hear later that the delay -- the reason Obama didn't come on the air until almost a full hour after he had said he would -- was because he wanted to personally call and inform the people who needed to be informed, which I guess means cabinet members and advisors, and the leaders of Pakistan, and so forth. Well, one or more of those people called other people, and sooner or later one or more people who had been called was the source of the leak; this is undoubtedly how it has always worked, but the far-reaching and essentially anarchic nature of Twitter is what makes this instance unique. On Twitter no one feels constrained from speculation and rumor, the way "real" news entities do; any given tweet can be all over the world within moments, retweeted and repeated far and wide, and once that happens there's no calling it back. If it had turned out that Obama actually announced something completely unrelated to bin Laden, it would have barely been a blip, a bump in the Twitter road. Someone might have tweeted a "my bad" and life goes on. It probably would have turned into a joke meme: hey, remember that time when Twitter killed bin Laden?
Did Obama know, by the time he came to the podium, that the story was already all over the news? I don't know. (At one point during the delay waiting for him to come on, I jokingly tweeted "Breaking: Obama cancels news conf, saying 'everyone already heard the news on Twitter so why bother?'") I sort of wonder whether he and/or his advisors knew and were annoyed, or resigned, or what. In any case, it's pretty clear that the way news gets disseminated, analyzed, and experienced by "average Joes" is changing fast, and any public figures who aren't ready to adapt are going to get trampled.
Amusingly, as I was writing this post, I got a tweet alerting me to this blog post, which is a really interesting analysis of the tweet that started it all, and how/why it spread. Check it out.
I was on Twitter around 9:45pm, starting to think about maybe going to bed, when there came out some tweets saying that President Obama would be holding a press conference at 10:30, topic unknown. So I figured, okay, I'll stay up for that, could be interesting.
But as the minutes went by, and the word spread, it started to sink in how unusual this was. The President calls a press conference for 10:30pm (his time) on a Sunday night, and NO ONE on Twitter knew what it was about -- including any of the many news outlets and political peeps that I follow. One of my Twitter friends posted that she had gotten word that the military base where she works had been bumped up to a higher alert level. I started to get a little worried, and I wasn't the only one. The mood was spreading. Other folks on Twitter were making nervous jokes about going to hide in the bunker, stocking up on bottled water, and so forth. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was desperately trying to find ways to fill up airtime when all he really had to say was "The President is going to say something and we don't know what."
The minutes ticked by, and the WhiteHouse.gov page where they were going to show the live feed of the press conference (with the bland heading "President Obama addresses the nation") was blank. At one point I pulled up the MSNBC live feed and heard one of the anchors say -- I think this was pure speculation though it wasn't clear -- that Obama was hastily revising and editing and re-revising his remarks, hence the delay.
Then, somewhere around 10:20 or 10:25, I think it was, the first tweet came out saying that US forces had killed bin Laden. Well, you can imagine how Twitter exploded on that one! It was all around within moments. Speculation and rumor were running wild. Meanwhile, the "mainstream" news people were shitting themselves (metaphorically ;) ) as they struggled to stick with "We don't know what the president is going to say..." even while the story was blowing up all around them. Some of them finally started to say things like "The rumor we're hearing is that..." but by about 10:50, which I believe was when I called my mom, almost all of the major news outlets were beginning to report it as fact. And by the time Obama actually did come on the air, around 11:10ish, it was anticlimactic, although still amazing to hear it from his mouth.
And then the processing began, on Twitter and elsewhere; and the "celebrations" at the White House and in NYC and here in Boston, college students partying in the streets, and some of us on Twitter talking about why they shouldn't be partying. Someone tweeted that he was on an airplane with a 9/11 widow, that she was sobbing and the entire plane was comforting her. It was a crazy atmosphere all over the internet. I didn't get to bed till after 1am (and I believe that one of my last tweets of that night said something like "Obama just made the announcement and then walked away. He didn't even apologize for keeping us up late on a school night.").
Then I got up the next morning and watched everyone who had already been asleep that night, waking up and going through the same process as they heard the news. That part was weird too.
The way the information moved through Twitter was and is really fascinating to me. The first tweet that came out saying he had it from a reputable source, spread like wildfire; and while most people (at least in my particular part of the Twittersphere) were trying to remain cautious and skeptical, the more it spread the more it had the ring of truth to it. We hear later that the delay -- the reason Obama didn't come on the air until almost a full hour after he had said he would -- was because he wanted to personally call and inform the people who needed to be informed, which I guess means cabinet members and advisors, and the leaders of Pakistan, and so forth. Well, one or more of those people called other people, and sooner or later one or more people who had been called was the source of the leak; this is undoubtedly how it has always worked, but the far-reaching and essentially anarchic nature of Twitter is what makes this instance unique. On Twitter no one feels constrained from speculation and rumor, the way "real" news entities do; any given tweet can be all over the world within moments, retweeted and repeated far and wide, and once that happens there's no calling it back. If it had turned out that Obama actually announced something completely unrelated to bin Laden, it would have barely been a blip, a bump in the Twitter road. Someone might have tweeted a "my bad" and life goes on. It probably would have turned into a joke meme: hey, remember that time when Twitter killed bin Laden?
Did Obama know, by the time he came to the podium, that the story was already all over the news? I don't know. (At one point during the delay waiting for him to come on, I jokingly tweeted "Breaking: Obama cancels news conf, saying 'everyone already heard the news on Twitter so why bother?'") I sort of wonder whether he and/or his advisors knew and were annoyed, or resigned, or what. In any case, it's pretty clear that the way news gets disseminated, analyzed, and experienced by "average Joes" is changing fast, and any public figures who aren't ready to adapt are going to get trampled.
Amusingly, as I was writing this post, I got a tweet alerting me to this blog post, which is a really interesting analysis of the tweet that started it all, and how/why it spread. Check it out.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-06 06:56 pm (UTC)I still have such mixed emotions. I don't want to rejoice at the death of *anyone.* And I don't think this death will stop any violence. But i also know that, despite growing up on the west coast, I was deeply affected by 9/11. It was my freshman year of college, and we had just been at school two weeks. And it just seems so odd that the world changed as I was growing into adulthood. I remember wondering if anything would ever feel safe and secure again. Where I grew up is actually right near a nuclear launch site or some sort (Nike Hill in the Seattle suburbs), and there was a lot of worry that those sorts of things would be targeted too.
I like the ideas you've got here. So interesting to have the news spread to twitter, and to spread so fast before the president could get news out. I'm not sure how I feel about that either. What's wrong with just being patient and waiting until the announcement can be made?
no subject
Date: 2011-05-06 09:00 pm (UTC)