Oscar Pistorius is being torn to pieces, 140 characters at a time. News and speculation of the double-amputee and South African sprints star’s alleged murder of his girlfriend have rocked the nation – and the Twittersphere.
Oscar Pistorius is being torn to pieces, 140 characters at a time. News and speculation of the double-amputee and South African sprints star’s alleged murder of his girlfriend have rocked the nation – and the Twittersphere.
Twitter has risen in popularity since its inception in 2006, cashing in on people’s need for instant gratification and easy-access information.
Limiting users to making posts, or 'tweets' of 140 characters or less, the microblogging site speaks to people who don’t even have to leave their homes or office chairs to hear the latest in world news.
A prime example is the Oscar Pistorius case which has become one of the most trending topics on Twitter.
But why are people using Twitter to follow this gripping national horror story? Smartphones make it easy to access the internet wherever you are and as Twitter is constantly being updated with news, it has become fast-paced, modern alternative to reading newspapers or watching TV.
The live court-tweeting of Oscar’s case has also proved popular with Twitter users. The fact that you can receive a blow-by-blow account of what is happening in the courtroom is hard to beat.
Twitter makes it easy to follow the case with its handy hashtag (#) function that filters and groups information on a particular topic.
For the uninitiated the hashtag is #OscarPistorius.
This makes it difficult for other social media platforms to keep up, especially since users can contribute to the conversation by adding a hashtag or using the @ sign when tweeting about a topic.
My problem with this is that there is so much speculation about what actually happened, and Twitter has opened the door for assumptions, opinions and rumours to become part of the public dialogue.
Once that information is out there people build up ideas of a story they may actually know very little about.
But this is perfect for Twitter; it demands and dishes out instant information that is filtered through to the public – and that’s all that people want, right?
Chante Daries is a fourth-year journalism and media studies student at Rhodes University.
