As we have all heard, Osama Bin Laden has been deemed dead by the United States of America and many other countries. Whether or not he is actually dead is irrelevant at this point because before 10 pm last night, America, or at least all my facebook friends were in celebration of Osama Bin Laden's death. I question who actually acquired this information from credible sources like the nightly news or through internet news broadcasting networks as opposed to the social networking sites themselves before they began posting comments and tweeting in a frenzy. I am guilty of finding out through facebook, although I thoroughly researched it after seeing many posts
I read an article about a man who lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan who was tweeting as the events of Osama's death began to unfold. Twitter and facebook have become the people's main means of acquiring information and is seems this has gotten a bit dangerous. This man who was simply tweeting an simple annoyance of noise has become a celebrity over night. Many people forget about the real situation at hand, neglect to do any research of their own, and rely on each other for such delicate information. It is interesting that news broadcasting networks have shed great light to an individual innocently tweeting about outside interruptions that were related to the actual death of Osama Bin Laden, but had absolutely nothing to do with the actual killing of Osama. The fact that any miniscule, seemingly meaningless piece of information that one posts on social media networks can be related to such an important event and can become known by the world in depth is definitely an effect of the new media. This normal man is now known internationally for tweeting the death of a United States enemy as it happened and without knowning.
What does this mean for future situations similar to this? I wonder if reporters will look to social media networks for information, perhaps not for first hand, hard news, but maybe for some type of idea or direction toward a certain topic. Facebook and Twitter are easily accessible to everyone, they are structured in a very simple form; people's statuses and tweets are usually to-the-point making it faster to obtain the main idea of whatever the topic may be. I don't think that this is too far fetched of an idea seeing how most of the people in our generation get big news from their facebook friends although I do find it a bit problematic.
The prominence of social networking sites could also potentially have a negative effect on the career of journalism. If over time people choose to neglect watching the news or buying newspapers because they feel anything important/big enough will be posted by at least one of their facebook friends. People's reliance on reporters may go down because there is "citizen reporting" going on in the world wide web.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/02/135913093/raid-on-bin-laden-was-live-blogged-though-the-blogger-didnt-know-it
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/02/135905185/osama-bin-laden-is-dead-officials-say
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/world/asia/osama-bin-laden-dead.html?hp
