Wednesday, May 4, 2011

The Raid on Bin Laden's compound and social media.


What does a raid on a terrorist compound and the ensuing social media commentary have to do with weird news? Actually, for once, everything.

First off, try to imagine your life 10 years ago. Most of you were still fooling around with beepers, forget cell phones, or any kind of smart phone. Now we live in a world where we people can unwittingly tweet about secret raids. $5 says someone in the neighborhood has cell phone video of it all too. I'll call that weird.

We also interact with our news in ways humans could never have dreamed of in the past. For better or for worse, take this article for example. We've found silly, yet ingenious ways to combine our news, or social media, or whole lives together on the internet. People are reviewing Bin-Laden's compound as if it was a restaurant.

The internet may not be new in the sense that it is a technology that brings us news faster than preceding technologies, but it sure does it in interesting ways.

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