Without trying to sound too melodramatic, we, as a culture, are at a junction when it comes to reporting the news and we have been at this junction for about two years. In my personal opinion, the Presidential Election of 2008 really cemented a new way to report news and now two years later, it has trickled to every type of news. I am, of course, referring to Twitter and all forms of microblogging and the misrepresentation of public thought via incomplete statistics.
The internet age with a combination of the cable news network age has made it completely acceptable to post and share stories without all the facts and without balanced reporting. This leads to slanted opinions, wrongful dissemination of information and an ill-informed public. The 2008 Presidential Election really helped usher in two more characteristics to cable news networks, that are now starting to infiltrate sports and other corners of everyday life. The first was Twitter which allowed for legitimate “news” to be a blurb under 140 characters. In this sense, it is almost impossible to separate rumor from fact. The second was collecting information from a small portion of the public, and suggesting that it represents everyone. In the 2008 election this would be any of the 382849284823 polls that were shown everyday and only every news network and is now continued on today. [Political Aside Coming Up, Sorry] This allows ignorant, racist, and incorrect views to be broadcast as news and then allows for some people to interpret these thoughts as the real deal.
What does this have to do with MLB.com? They have rolled out recently their MLB.com Pulse which is included at the bottom of every game recap. It's a timeline that shows runs, highlights, tweets and tweet volume. Despite how generally awful Twitter is in the news (see previous paragraph), it is actually a really interesting new dimension to baseball. In a way, since people are tweeting exactly what they are feeling (and it is not always arranged in a correct mannor), it feels like you are actually at that game when you read them. Hopefully though, this will stay to just tweets during the game, and being reposted at the end. In this use, Twitter is just a side of the article meal, rather than being the entire entre. Hopefully MLB will not go the ESPN way with this over using of online voting (see my rant on the ESPY's) because thats when Twitter, and statistics in sports become useless.
To be more clear, when Twitter and all of this new technology is being used, like MLB.com's Pulse, then its useful because it is being advetrised as being the public opinion and public reaction to events. When these opinions are given too much power though, and get blended in with facts as story filler, they start to become detrimental to society actually learning the facts in a story. Oddly enough, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC could all learn a thing or two about how to use their internet polling and twitter reactions from MLB.com (with of course, decency censors).
