inertianinja
05-17-2008, 01:51 AM
this post will be extremely nerdy.
so, apparently people twittered about the earthquake and the story spread via twitter hours before any major news source was able to put together a story.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080515/tc_pcworld/145923
so, i was thinking about twitter in this light...and i'm a lawyer, so naturally i can only think inside my own little world.
i was thinking about evidence rules - in particular the hearsay rule. in a nutshell, you can't introduce into evidence a statement that was made by someone outside of court because it wasn't made under oath and you can't confront them to see if they lied....
...but there are exceptions for situations where the circumstances under which the statement was made would give you some reassurance that the statement was the truth.
two of these are the "Excited Utterance" and "Present Sense Impression" which mean that if someone says something about what's going on ("Oh god, bob just shot that guy!" or "damn the sky is blue today") as it's happening, it's reliable because they said it before they would have had a chance to even think that they should lie about it.
so i was thinking that this concept applies to twitter. generally people tweet about things *while they're happening*....so they're essentially reporting news contemporaneously with the actual event and before there's any chance to think about what way to politically spin it, lie about it, etc.
if that makes any sense, it really does have the potential to be a good news source, free of the bullshit back-room spin decisions that otherwise plague the "news" we get.
whatchu think?
(if anyone's following me on twitter, you know i'm doing a felony trial right now...so that's why i'm thinking all legal-y)
so, apparently people twittered about the earthquake and the story spread via twitter hours before any major news source was able to put together a story.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080515/tc_pcworld/145923
so, i was thinking about twitter in this light...and i'm a lawyer, so naturally i can only think inside my own little world.
i was thinking about evidence rules - in particular the hearsay rule. in a nutshell, you can't introduce into evidence a statement that was made by someone outside of court because it wasn't made under oath and you can't confront them to see if they lied....
...but there are exceptions for situations where the circumstances under which the statement was made would give you some reassurance that the statement was the truth.
two of these are the "Excited Utterance" and "Present Sense Impression" which mean that if someone says something about what's going on ("Oh god, bob just shot that guy!" or "damn the sky is blue today") as it's happening, it's reliable because they said it before they would have had a chance to even think that they should lie about it.
so i was thinking that this concept applies to twitter. generally people tweet about things *while they're happening*....so they're essentially reporting news contemporaneously with the actual event and before there's any chance to think about what way to politically spin it, lie about it, etc.
if that makes any sense, it really does have the potential to be a good news source, free of the bullshit back-room spin decisions that otherwise plague the "news" we get.
whatchu think?
(if anyone's following me on twitter, you know i'm doing a felony trial right now...so that's why i'm thinking all legal-y)