Twitter
has become an important tool for sharing cross-checked information and above
all, a way to participate and interact directly with others in a way that we
all together can affect/change subsequent real life facts related with that
information.
Before the
existence of social networks one was used to read newspapers or watch TV as passive
receiver of opinions and news. We used to tolerate those showmen and women that
had no idea of what were they talking about and had a large bad impact in
misinforming or no informing at all the audiences. Someone in an office decided
what was important to explain and remark of a real fact at the news hour. No
one was there to tell them “Hey, this is not true” or “What an inappropriate
way to treat a delicate event”.
Of course, micro-blogging
in Twitter can be empty and superficial, as in any mass media. Twitting has
sense only if with sharing our opinions on a labeled (#) real facts, we call
for attention and exercise pressure on what is going on. For example, assassination
of journalist in some Latin American countries is a fact largely ignored and
dismissed by local governments. People every time it happens emit their point
of view, explain their own version, or refine information related with what
happened. Then people are able to bring world-wide attention of these crimes and
the terrible and official silence that follows every time they happen. This Twitter
effect also existed in 2010 when the Democracy Spring at the Arab countries.
There, people organized and call for action and change of governments using this site.
If deep thinking is
to construct long discourses on specific topics, then Twitter is not the place to intechange them.
Blogs and forums are widely spread in internet to explain these ideas. Twitter
is now a new tool to control/reinforce/amend information from what once was
thought untouchable or inaccessible to all of us: the mass media and/or the
official information. It also promotes active full participation of people who has
now a channel to point things happening around them and gives them some power to change the consequences
for good or for bad.
