While I was at the Deanery Synod meeting yesterday evening, apparently some kid in Colorado was suspected of climbing into a homemade hot-air balloon and sailing quite a ways. When the balloon came down, no sign of the boy. He was later found hiding in the attic of his home. His dad denied it was a publicity stunt for some reality TV show his family is participating in.
(P.S. Balloon Boy is Eurasian and in about 15 years will be quite handsome as long as he doesn’t pull too many stunts like this.)
The interesting thing is that #balloonboy was the top trending topic on Twitter when I sat down at the computer upon returning home from the meeting. However, by looking at the Tweets being tweeted with that hashtag, I was no wiser here in the UK about (1) what was going on, (2) where it was happening, or (3) where to get further information. There was no substance, just comments and exclamations.
It certainly brought home to me that fact that in the cyberverse the US throws its weight around out of all proportion to its population vis-a-vis the rest of the world. All the Tweeters assumed that all other Tweeters were seeing the live coverage on their TVs everywhere in the galaxy so no background was needed. Perhaps in the US such background was redundant. However, as far as I am aware, even the BBC didn’t have anything on their news page until most of the story was known.
What is the moral of the story? Do Tweeters and other members of the great cyberverse-of-teh-Now need to provide background to everything they Tweet? Was it my responsibility to look around and find out who Balloon Boy was and what was going on? Or should I just filter out mentally all the dreck and garbage that crosses my screen if I’m not immediately interested in it or there’s no apparent background information readily available?
I’m confused.
I’m glad I’m not into twitter
I enjoy it. But then again, I enjoy lots of things that other people simply go “Meh!” to.
Or perhaps it was “Ugh!”
Can’t recall now…
i dun tink twitter is a place to share background info. it’s more for, like u said, comments n bitching n joking.
but i tink if u asked wat happened, they may pt u to somewhere for info?
Well, normally when something trends on Twitter, there is a link somewhere in the stream of consciousness that you can follow to find out what the trend is. There wasn’t anything here.
Anyway, the parents apparently made it up to get some publicity. They will probably be able to enjoy the publicity from jail.