Twitter Moments

The internet has completely uprooted the foundations of the printing press. A material company is constrained by how many copies of a certain product it can produce cost effectively. The internet allows for the creation of unlimited copies for no cost at all. With the integration of the internet into people’s lives came the integration of social media into people’s lives. And, brilliantly, Facebook, social-media-gargantuan, has come to incorporate news into their platform, and thus again into people’s lives.
Initially Facebook was much less news based than it currently is. More and more people consult Facebook for their news. The percentage of people who use Facebook for news is up 16% from 2013. Now 63% of Facebook users consume news while on Facebook (http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/news-use-on-facebook-and-twitter-is-on-the-rise/). As Facebook redefines the consumption of news for the average person, other social media groups will likely gain traction as sources of news. When people become more comfortable with the idea of using their social media for news, I suspect Twitter’s “Moments” section will become quite popular. Twitter has a platform that is quick and casual, allowing users to use the mobile app for mere seconds at a time effectively. For better or worse, I see the current direction of news as becoming generally more casual. In order to support that idea, Twitter has a pretty solid news section. Under Moments users can choose between News, Sports, Entertainment, and Fun. Those are some pretty palatable divisions of information, really. Lots of people could probably choose at least three out of four of those sections to just be lumped together under “Fun.” Users can immediately engage in discussion on any topic by tweeting to the hashtag of any event. To open the news section, users touch one button, and then can swipe through different stories.
With such a low barrier of entry and access to immediate interaction and conversation about any given article, I see Twitter’s Moments section as a likely platform/tool to facilitate an ever-more-casual, more prompt news system.