Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Tweeting for history, Chapter 2

The twitterverse is a strange place. I happened to be on Twitter intermittently last Wednesday when the young soldier was murdered in Woolwich, and following the #Woolwich trend was, ah, fascinating.

One of the tweeters I noted was a rapper named Boya Dee (@Boyadee), who was logging comments apparently in real time:



(This is social media—you have to read from the bottom up.)

As with the case of Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad two years ago, Boya Dee became quite the media sensation. He was apparently beating off reporters & TV presenters with a carpet-whacker.

Because of that, what news stories you can find about him are basically rehashes of his tweets. Interestingly, if you go to his Twitter feed today, all the real-time Woolwich tweets have been deleted. The Rodney King-like call for everyone to just get along is still there; everything else is gone.

Here's his header & feed from the 23rd; all the tweets have disappeared (& as of this writing, he has 25,051 followers):



So I don’t know what to make of it. Like Twitter itself, it’s pretty much just out there.




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