Many media types live in the land of Twitter, but most regular people don’t

When the East Coast earthquake struck in late August, it appeared to hit particularly hard a place called “Twitter.”

“U.S. East Coast earthquake generated more Tweets than Osama bin Laden death,” the United Kingdom’s Telegraph reported.

(Illustration by Allie Ghaman/The Washington Post; photo from bigstockphoto, texture from sxc.hu)

“Earthquake Hits East Coast: Aftershocks Felt on Twitter,” said TheWrap.com, a Los Angeles-based publication.

The Wall Street Journal helpfully chimed in with “Earthquake on the East Coast: The Reaction on Twitter,” composed of earthquake tweets from experts such as Ice-T, Rihanna and Snooki. Bethenny Frankel, we learned, was in the middle of lunch!

Where is this Twitter? Was it anywhere close to the earthquake’s epicenter in Mineral, Va.? The people who live in Twitter — do you think that they often consort with the people who live in Facebook, another strange and wonderful land that often appears in the news?

Media types love social networking. Love using it, love finding sources with it, love analyzing it, love writing about it, love love love. It’s a way of demonstrating how much we “get it.” Except it can also demonstrate that we don’t.

You’ve read these stories. There were stories when teachers started using Facebook, stories when coaches started using Facebook, stories when congressmen and judges and authors started using Facebook. There were stories on mothers using Facebook, then grandmothers. There were stories on every demographic using Facebook, until, finally, everyone was there and someone left to join something new.

Then there were stories on how everybody was on Twitter.

“I bet that what’s happening is that editors of a certain age are starting to discover it and are getting a little amazed by it,” says Mike Hoyt, the executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

It’s all happened before

In the past few years, online social networks have, indeed, allowed us to witness amazing behavior. People have found biological parents on Facebook. People have discovered cheating spouses on Facebook. People have been cyberbullied on Facebook.

(Disclosure: I have written dozens of articles about Facebook and Twitter. Some of them were good, I think, and some weren’t. Irony: A reporter who has written lots about social networks writes another article about overexposure to Facebook.)

Facebook and Twitter have become, depending on the theme of the article in question, either beacons of light or harbingers of doom — revealing how profoundly the world has changed and how, because of social networks, things are happening that never happened before.

Right?

Except that people cheated on spouses before Facebook. And people found birth parents before Facebook, too. Bullying, social isolation and teenage heartbreak are not made sadder by the fact that they now exist online as well as in the corners of middle school locker rooms.

“The moral panic about teenagers and technology is an ongoing frustration for me,” says social media researcher Danah Boyd, whose area of expertise is the way young people use the Internet.

Boyd recalls one story about a teenage girl who was charged with murdering her mother. “The [television] headlines were, ‘Girl on MySpace Kills Mother,’ ” she says. “But what’s heartbreaking was that for a year and a half she’d been documenting how her mother was abusive. It’s sad that ‘Abused Girl Kills Mother’ is not a story, but ‘Girl on MySpace Kills Mother’ is.” (An actual print headline from this case: “Murder, They Blogged.”)