Balloon Boy Hysteria: Takeaways From Twitter’s OJ Moment

At around 2pm today Twitter erupted with an overwhelming output of messages related to 6-year old Falcon Heene, who at the time was believed to be traveling across Colorado trapped in a makeshift flying balloon.  All at once, #balloonboy, Balloon Boy, and #saveballoonboy were dominant trending topics on the micro-blogging platform.

The incident itself was reminiscent of the infamous police chase following OJ Simpson’s white Bronco across Southern California.  Millions of viewers around the country glued to the screen sharing the same curiosity and emotional investment in something completely out of the ordinary.  A movie unfolding in real time.

But 13 years later most of us were glued to a different screen, and it wasn’t the only change. In 1995 we simply sat back and watched.  At the most we may have phoned a friend to trade thoughts (and mutual disdain at NBC for cutting away from the Knicks in the NBA Finals).  As a nation of viewers we only shared the footage and the feeling.

In 2009 we were not only watching together.  Millions of us shared our thoughts, emotions, and every bit of updated news we could scour to form an awe-inspiring conversation through the social web.  This was more than just another news story.  It was Twitter’s “OJ Moment”.

I’m sure in the coming days we’ll hear way too much about the Balloon Boy incident - the stats on Twitter engagement and viewership, the bits and pieces of the story that are only now beginning to surface, and hundreds of bloggers and journalists waxing more poetic than I on what this means for the wide world of social media.

For now, a few kneejerk thoughts:

• Twitter again proved its place in the communication org chart. As we saw with the #iranelection months back, love it or not Twitter serves a purpose that no other medium of communication can substitute for.  Facebook’s great, but even with their new search features you don’t get the real-time discussion you do on Twitter. Never mind television and radio. Any bit of news or information available around this incident was on the web faster then you can spell CNN.  Even more remarkable to me, you could simply feel the impact of this story on the country just by seeing how many thousand tweets were updating each minute.
• Twitter will never ever ever replace the need for professional journalism. This story turned out not to be true. In fact, it’s almost certain it was intentionally fabricated.  Yet hearing about it in 3,452,165th person doesn’t give you much of an opportunity to even consider that.  Great reporters do their homework and solidify the truth before they put their stamp on it.  Twitterers don’t.  That’s not to say that tweeting doesn’t have its place in digging into the truth of a story.  It’s just to say that real journalism has a place as well.
• It’s still the simple things that grab our attention. I’d love to see the stats on the chatter today over #balloonboy vs. the chatter this month over Health Care, Afghanistan and Unemployment.  Certainly over the course of the month there’s been more said about our sociopolitical issues, but has there ever been a specific moment where we were all this captivated by something which seems significantly more important to us as a whole.  Not likely.  And it’s not a surprise, but for all the social media philosophers who dream that the web is taking us toward a more vibrant and in-depth discussion, here’s another reason to abandon that theory.
• The system can and will be gamed. A common misstatement and misunderstanding about social media is that we can no longer be fooled. We like to say transparency is the key, pure hype is a thing of the past, and nature of the web is to prevent the wool from being pulled over our eyes.  Clearly this isn’t the case, or at least we’re not there yet.  It’s looking like a punk husband and wife from Colorado punked America, and did it knowing full well the role social media would play in raising the stakes of the prank.  I wouldn’t be shocked if the producers of Wife Swap had a role in it themselves, and you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think the best creative agencies in the business have taken note.

All in all, today was another keystone moment in the shift from terrestrial to digital media.  The way we communicate is changing faster than we realize, and it’s great to see it happen before our very eyes and tweets. As ridiculous as it sounds, I will likely remember for the rest of my life where I was when #saveballoonboy began trending on Twitter.com.