[Infowarrior] - 6 stages of Twitter media coverage hell

[Richard Forno]

  March 31, 2009 - 12:46 P.M.
The 6 stages of Twitter media coverage hell

http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_6_stages_of_twitter_media_coverage_hell

The Twitter microblogging service has received an absurd quantity of  
press in the mainstream media lately. Everybody has been talking about  
it, from CNN, which has built entire shows around it, to The View,  
where each host tries to out do the others in how clueless she is  
about Twitter. And now, the inevitable "Twitter backlash" has begun.  
What does it all mean?

In a word, nothing.

The so-called backlash is just the media's knee-jerk pseudo- 
contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly  
overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and  
commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably,  
attacking Twitter itself.

My advice: Don't take any of it too seriously. The media does this  
with every truly major Internet phenomenon that comes along. It  
happened with the Internet itself, then e-mail, then the Web, then the  
tech bubble, then social networking and now Twitter.

Here are the 6 stages of media coverage hell that the press and the TV  
networks are putting us all through:



     1. Ignore

     Even though Twitter was clearly an interesting service with fast  
growth and very enthusiastic users, the mainstream media pretty much  
ignored it for the first year and a half. It simply didn't exist on TV  
or in the newspapers.

     2. Dismiss

     Say, six months ago, when Twitter did come up in media stories,  
it was largely belittled as a dorky, obscure nerd thing.

     3. Introduce

     Once discovered, the media spent six months "introducing" Twitter  
over and over as if every mention was the first time anyone had ever  
heard of it.

     4. Hype

     This is where the media echo chamber really comes into full  
force. Every media outlet talks about Twitter, and talks about talking  
about Twitter. Even luddite reporters work in mentions of Twitter to  
create the impression that they're in touch with trends. Any story  
with a Twitter angle becomes automatically newsworthy. Coverage is  
overwhelmingly positive.

     5. Criticize

     Once the media is itself deafened by the echo chamber, it turns  
on itself and starts slamming Twitter as an overblown, overhyped fad  
-- never admitting that the media itself was the one overblowing and  
overhyping it all along. Coverage is overwhelmingly negative.

     6. Ignore

     Once Twitter has been thoroughly overexposed and discredited, the  
media will ignore it once again.



What makes this a media echo chamber is that none of this really has  
anything to do with Twitter itself, or the communities growing there.

As the media labels, pigeonholes, stereotypes, lionizes, belittles and  
condescends to the people on Twitter, real people on Twitter remain  
pretty much everybody and anybody. As the media ignorantly  
mischaracterizes what happens on Twitter, and what people do with it,  
Twitter remains a service that people do an unfathomable number of  
things with.

In all the hype and counter-hype, it will be utterly forgotten that  
Twitter is nothing more than a service for sending messages that lots  
of people find useful.

Because people can involve Twitter in a huge number of activities, and  
can say anything, reporters looking for certain kinds of stories good  
or bad will always find what they're looking for.

To misuse a metaphor -- just because you find a needle in a haystack  
doesn't mean it was really a stack of needles all along.

Anyway, we're transitioning now from stage 4 to stage 5, so brace  
yourself. The good news is that the echo chamber cycle is almost  
complete. Before you know it, the media will go away and leave us  
alone again.