Let’s face it: I’m old. On weeknights and weekends, I’m usually in bed by 10:00 PM (EST), which means I must record and watch later The Killing, The Good Wife, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Late Night with David Letterman, and Parenthood. This also means I don’t check in with my social networks — from which I receive 90% of my national, world, and Hollywood news — until roughly 6:30 the next morning. (If I were on Twitter, I’d likely include the hashtag #firstworldproblems here.)
For the most part, my early-to-bed ritual doesn’t affect things very much. Sure, perhaps I’ll miss some snark about Glee and Justified or some serious commentary on HBO’s obsession with boobies but nothing too earth-shattering. However, that was not the case this morning when I logged in to the ole Twitter account. Please keep in mind that Sundays from 10:00 PM to 6:30 AM are normally the slowest tweeting time of the week. For example, after one refresh, I normally have a mere 125 tweets to sift through (yes, that’s slow.) But this morning, Twitter refreshed. And refreshed. And refreshed. And then refreshed some more. To quote one of my colleagues, over the course of eight hours “Twitter ‘sploded.”
Because I’m anal like that, I started at the beginning of the feed. Apparently the news organizations received word that President Obama was scheduled to speak. But then, they had to wait, stall, filling the air space with (their normal) ridiculous speculations. It seems that most of my followers had reluctantly tuned in to Wolf Blitzer on CNN:
Then, after what evidently seemed like forever for those watching, Obama made the announcement:
Tonight I can report to the American people and the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden. [...] After a fire fight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. [...] Tonight, let us think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on 9/11. I know that it has, at times, frayed. Yet today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people. [...] Justice has been done.
My Twitter feed was not quite as eloquent as all that, but I got the point (and had a chuckle or two in the process):
After reading Fienberg’s revision of President Andrew Shepard’s speech from The American President (directly above), I continued to scroll through my feed to find tweets from God, Jesus, Bin Laden’s Ghost, and Bin Laden in Hell:
That’s right, folks. Within minutes of learning that Osama Bin Laden was dead, someone created an @OsamaInHell Twitter account. Sigh. After shaking my head, I continued to scroll upward to find more funny and potentially disrespectful tweets on the matter:
Moreover, as these images and the tweets below depict, cheers rang out near the White House, in the streets of New York, and other places in the US and around the world. Conversely, others were more introspective and arguably downright conflicted about Bin Laden’s death.
Wow. So many tweets.
So much information.
So many opinions.
Such a barrage of thoughts to wake up to, especially on a Monday morning, again, normally the slowest tweeting night/day of the week. As such, I’ll devote this last bit of space to those people who were contemplating the power of and interest in Twitter, which is, those devoted to the social network know, a complete game-changer in the world of news and the way we share and access information — or as the last tweet below claims, a place where we can perhaps find “far more real news than on the [televised] news.”
More on Twitter’s reaction to Bin Laden’s death, visit Newsy.com.
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Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,