AMSTERDAM CRASH APPEARS FIRST ON TWITTER

Microblogging site reveals the Turkish airlines disaster before mainstream media. Eyewitnesses put details on Twitter before the journalists knew about it.The rapid growth of the Internet and the amount of Internet users is absolutely no secret. More and more people are meeting partners online, most people now do their shopping online and not being listed on a social network has become somewhat a taboo issue. Basically, it is almost impossible to hold a non-manual job nowadays without being able to use the Internet and many business people are online the whole day. However, many people do not realise that the Internet has become so advanced that it reports events even before the mainstream media manages to get its hands on the job.The precedent for such a notion has been set recently after news about the earthquake in China was first made public on the Internet, as was news about the shootings in Mumbai. It is now very typical for eyewitnesses, or the victims themselves, to post their experiences on the web before news about these events appears in the newspapers or on television. After all, the Internet is such a globally important part of many peoples’ lives that this is to be expected. It also happened recently in Amsterdam.When an eyewitness, living close to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, saw the Turkish Airlines flight crash, his first reaction was not to call anybody, yet to post information about the disaster, in which 9 people lost their lives, on Twitter. Subsequently, a picture of the crash was published on the Twitter site, which has since been viewed 72.000 times by the users. It has even been suggested by some experts that newspapers and certain news programs may dwindle as our reliance on the Internet becomes greater and greater.