The raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was posted to Twitter in real time by Sohaib Athar, tweeting as @ReallyVirtual from Abbottabad in Pakistan, who had no idea what he was describing. In the United States the first word of the death came from a tweet by a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld. Read in sequence afterwards, Athar’s messages track the operation as it happened.
This is the case that made the ambient journalism argument concrete. Acts of journalism were going on continuously on the service, by citizens and professionals alike, but Athar’s tweets were fragments without meaning attached: they became legible only once other fragments arrived to connect them. Neither the writer nor the readers could interpret them at the time.
That is the difficulty the framing leaves behind. If journalism is all around, the question stops being how to obtain information and becomes how to filter it and give it meaning. The comparison drawn here was to the early web, when Yahoo set out to index and categorise every site in the world until Google found a better way to navigate it. The tools available for reading Twitter in 2011 were basic by comparison and taxed the reader’s attention rather than saving it, though companies such as Sulia were beginning to work on the problem.