“Okay, this will be another trivial news story,” I sighed as I picked up the phone. Clearly I was wrong—for once, truly breaking news that Osama bin Laden had been killed.
With iPhone in hand I immediately opened up Twitter and watched the feed continually updating. All tweets focused on the surprise forthcoming Presidential announcement and speculation. As the president spoke these were followed by reaction, commentary and yes, humor: @TomBodett “Trump not convinced. Demands Bin Laden long-form death certificate.”
The following graph compares how my tweet feed split between tweets related to bin Laden (red line) and those not (blue line) from 7 pm on May 1 to 4 pm on May 2. I scanned back in my tweet stream. “POTUS jolts us awake with unanticipated newscast announcement” was quickly followed by people commenting on the tap-dancing of the networks as they waited for news. Within an hour, every tweet was related to the announcement. From 11 to midnight EDT my tweets scrolled quickly by, dropping off shortly after the President's TV announcement and picking up in the morning as people got back on-line.
Around 11:20 pm @Pogue apparently disembarked from a plane, and tweeted before scanning his tweet stream on an interview with Marty Cooper. The only other completely ordinary tweet that followed in the middle of the night, I actually considered directly related to the unfolding events as @hodgman retweeted @ParisHilton who was looking forward to getting back to her pets sometime after midnight east coast time.
The twitter-ether created an interactive community buzzing with personal reactions to a highly charged and momentous story as it unfolded. From humor to poignancy to patriotism to reflection, a flood of top of mind thoughts brought me close to strangers, friends I only know through twitter, newscasters whom I know, but who don’t know me—a fascinating, educated, opinionated, thoughtful, humorous, reactive group. Collectively their tweets influenced my reaction. I felt I could talk through what I was thinking and synthesize the tumult of thoughts flinging through my brain. My twitter community was far greater company than the newscasters on air trying to fill air time waiting for the President to speak, or rehashing what the President had said as they scrambled for more information.
I was put off by terms like “victory” and “celebrate”. Surely a time to reflect and be thankful an evil voice had been silenced, but I prefer to celebrate peace and hope not death and destruction. Most online shared similar sentiments even as news of people celebrating in the streets of the physical world was tweeted into our on-line community.
The Twitter-ether was alive and the Twitter community seemed to make the world a bit more interwoven and a lot smaller.
