Like It Or Not, Twitter Is The Pulse Of The Media

The last few days on Twitter have been pretty amazing, and it’s perfectly illustrated something that many would not have foreseen and others would have flat-out dismissed: in just a few short months, Twitter has become the pulse of the media.

The reaction to Jan Moir’s ill-advised commentary in the Daily Mail about the death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately is notable for many reasons. At one point Moir and the Mail occupied four of Twitter’s trending topics, which is significant in and of itself. This overwhelmingly negative public response, which was spearheaded by several well-known celebrities (including Stephen Fry, Derren Brown, Charlton Brooker and many others) forced Moir to make a weak apology.

In her statement, Moir made reference to what she perceived to be a “heavily orchestrated internet campaign” against her, which simply underlines her naivety. There was nothing orchestrated about Twitter’s reaction. It was entirely organic, and this is what makes it so important. There may have been a valid point buried somewhere in Moir’s article, but it was lost in a sea of questionable euphemism and prejudice. Quite rightly, she was brought to task.

Still, as is typical whenever the mob gets involved in anything, not everybody was batting for the same team. There’s an amusing Jan Moir account on Twitter that is quite clearly a spoof. Many have, however, assumed it to be genuine, and the messages being sent to @janmoir are quite eye-opening. Amongst the usual vitriol and hyperbole, there’s a wealth of unpleasantness, personal attacks, threats and even some prejudice, the irony of which has clearly been lost on the participants. It reminds us once again that as the distinction between the internet and ‘real life’ continues to blur, we have to suffer the bad as well as the good.

Any attempt to defend Moir would be folly, as she has nobody to blame for this fallout but herself (and perhaps her editor). However, there are a lot of idiots out there, many of whom will not have even read Moir’s piece, but are simply jumping on the bandwagon. Of course, we saw something very similar to this in the ‘Sachsgate’ story involving Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand around this time last year. Of the forty thousand or so who complained there, only a small percentage were reported to have heard the original broadcast, and the bulk of the complaints occurred many days after it originally aired.  It is again with irony that one notes that the Sunday edition of the Mail was responsible for bringing this story to the attention of the masses.

We should acknowledge that trending topics on Twitter often become self-fulfilling. The initial wave of publicity that arises from a large number of tweets gets a topic onto the leaderboard, which brings it to the attention of everybody who is using Twitter.com (the trending topics are permanently displayed on the right sidebar), which means millions of other people have a fresh opportunity to be appalled and outraged, too. And once a few celebrities are involved – often hand-in-hand with plenty of back-pats and toadying – the job is effectively done. After all, if Stephen Fry is annoyed, over three-quarters of a million of his fans will be, too.

But how an item becomes a trending topic is less important as to what happens when it gets there. I noted with interest over the weekend that British talent show The X-Factor utilised Twitter in a number of different ways. As well as the fairly standard ticker-tape of (carefully-filtered) tweets, the show made direct reference to polling Twitter’s reaction to the performance of Girls Aloud member (and X-Factor judge) Cheryl Cole, who is attempting a solo career and performed live on the show. Cole had been a trending topic almost the entire day, and the response on Twitter was generally positive, and reported as such by presenter Holly Willoughby. It wasn’t all good – nothing is – but it was good enough, and naturally the production team were not going to pass on every message.

In this way, Twitter shares a circular relationship with the media. The media creates a story, which then trends heavily on the network, and this is then reported on by the media, which further boosts the trend.

Increasingly, stories are breaking on Twitter first, and then being picked up by the mass media, where the cycle starts as above. In other cases (notably the events in Iran), Twitter is the source of news, and when mass media can or will not report on a certain story, Twitter itself becomes the story, too. This allocates an enormous amount of influence and power to the public, and it allows us to re-address the age-old question of whether the tail wags the dog, or vice versa. It has long been suggested that the mass (and certainly tabloid) media plays a large part in dumbing-down our culture, but if you take a quick look at the most popular videos on YouTube – a chart which is entirely user-influenced – one has to wonder. We seem to be doing a pretty good job all by ourselves.

Perhaps Twitter is the new dog in the neighbourhood, and now competes, and even works with old media to tell us what to think, while at the same time injecting us with the illusion that we are the ones in control.

It’s all about eyeballs, of course, that truism will likely never change, and whereas Jan Moir may disagree that there is no such thing as bad publicity, it certainly hasn’t done the Mail any lasting damage. Right before they were pressured to take them down, the advertisements surrounding Moir’s article would have received millions of impressions.

And let’s face it – nobody who is at all familiar with this newspaper would have been that surprised, or horrified, by their involvement in these events. One doubts they’ll lose too many readers over this; indeed, they’ve probably increased their subscription rate. And they can give thanks to Twitter for a lot of that new audience.

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