What water cooler?

Use of social networking sites to communicate news continues to rise

It was 9:26 p.m. Sunday when two pop artists at opposite ends of the musical spectrum sparked a nationwide frenzy in the form of status updates on Facebook and Twitter.

9:28 p.m. – I’m about to go down to radio city music hall and punch KANYE.

9:32 p.m. – Seriously Kanye? Give back the mic.

9:33 p.m. – TWEET 4 TEAM TAYLOR!!!!

9:35 p.m. – News flash dummies…Kanye is rich now he does what he wants…ya’ll made him don’t hate him.

This was the banter that flooded our news feeds Sunday evening, sending Red & Black staffers – at work during the apparent celebrity showdown – straight to Google for the whole story. In case you also missed it, here’s how the riveting drama unfolded:

Country music singer Taylor Swift won “Best Female Video” at MTV’s annual Video Music Awards. During her acceptance speech, rap artist Kanye West rushed the stage and stole Swift’s microphone to announce that the award (in his opinion) instead belonged to Beyonce Knowles, another hot young thing that sings and dances to a beat.

What piqued our interest at The Red & Black was not the televised drama, but the cyber dialogue that followed. On Twitter alone, 300,000 people tweeted about the incident in the hour that followed – according to Trendrr, which tracks Twitter buzz. That’s one third the population of Delaware.

It was hours after the VMAs aired that Google trends, a tool that tracks popular search terms, reported a peak in the hundreds of thousands of searches for the story.

This begs the question: With the permeating grapevine of Facebook and Twitter, who needs the water cooler anymore? We find out news – celebrity and otherwise – on social media sites instead of news organizations, and we tell cyber space instead of each other. It’s a scary thought.

-The Red & Black Editorial Board