Balloon Boy and Social Media, a match made in heaven.

It is official--we are crazy. By we, I mean the U.S. and by crazy, I mean we will do ANYTHING to be noticed. As if celebrities like Kanye West at the VMA's or those guys on youtube that made a beach video to the Miley Cirus song weren't ridiculous enough, last Thursday we get the worst of the worst--Balloon Boy and his family.

I was working out at the gym on campus. Forgetting my I-pod, I had to plug my headphones into the treadmill to watch TV. I tuned to BREAKING NEWS ON CNN about a young boy who disappeared and was thought to have been floating around in a home made hot air balloon over Colorado! I was at the gym for an entire hour while CNN talked about poor little Flacon, the boy who got in his father's hot air balloon. However, soon enough, the balloon landed and was found empty!! Where was Falcon?! Search and rescue teams swarmed the area and almost every other channel's daily news covered the story. So many times CNN announcers said, "Lets just hope that he's hiding in his house somewhere, and is afraid to come out and be punished" and what do you know...that's what DID happen! Or, kind of. I got back from the gym and turned my TV on at home.

Details of the Heene family started to surface during the search. They family had appeared on the reality show Wife Swap before, and the father was a professional storm chaser with a website. The Heene's were known for "living life on the wild side".

Eventually, Falcon was found hiding in his attic. Soon after, interviews with the Heene family surfaced and something funny happened. The entire event was ruled a hoax! It turns out that Falcon's parents told him to hide in the attic and when he was interviewed by CNN later, Flacon gave up the secret. When asked why he didn't come out of the attic when he heard his father calling him he said, "Um you guys (his mom and dad) said we did this for the show."Leave it to a young child to tell the truth.

Here's the actual CNN interview with the Heene family when Falcon spilled the beans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI6UONWCq7A&feature=player_embedded

But the Heene family are not the only ones to be blamed in this situation. The media plays a large role. First it was breaking news and all over the media. Then, as the story was ruled a hoax, even more coverage was given. Try searching "Ballon Boy" on Twitter. After your first result, guaranteed within 2 seconds 60 more posts will surface and you'll have to refresh. The story spread through social media like a wild fire. Everyone was talking about it, and it ended up getting more attention than it deserved. America could just not get enough of the sick and twisted hoax the Heene's pulled.

The whole situation escalated into something that makes me sick to even think about. Have we really gotten to the point in our society where the best way to get attention, is to fake a missing child? Not only that, but it seems as though social media is just a freak show! We as American's love these kind of stories, and we eat them up. But this has to stop. Instead of blogging out a hoax, lets blog about more important things. There are plenty of educational blogs out there, whether political, international, environmental, etc. If we paid more attention to the stories that matter, I think our country would slowly fade from the reputation we have earned. It's no wonder the Heene's were chosen to be on Wife Swap in the first place. When we have families that are willing to waste the selfless efforts of search and rescue teams, police officers, and more because they knew that the media would easily grab the story, we've really got a problem on our hands. The Heene's should be ashamed of themselves, but I have a feeling they're not. They got the publicity they wanted, and even though it's not good publicity, they're infamous. Does this seem right to you?

By the way, the Heene's are going to court:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8315042.stm

Twitter, not too shabby

So the Twitter project is over and while I’m still not the biggest fan of Twitter, I see it’s relevance. Before class, I refused to get a twitter. I rarely update my facebook status and knew twitter would be the same. Who cares what I have to say in 140 characters? No one is going to read it, or reply to it. I soon realized though, that Twitter is not so much about me sharing my day as it is about sharing mass quantities of information.

At first it was confusing. What does # mean? Why do I have to put an @ sign in front of people I want to talk to? What is RT? How do I follow people, and what does it mean when people follow me? I felt like Twitter was a whole new language that I would never understand.

After using it every day for class, I started to get the hang of it. Not only did I slowly start to understand the lingo, but I realized I could follow whoever and whatever I wanted. One of the first sources I followed was CNN and the Journal Sentinel. I like reading the paper but as a college student, I don’t have time anymore. Following news sources on Twitter game me the latest headlines at my fingertips. I didn’t have to search for anything. Next I started to follow important people at Marquette and organizations that I’m interested in working for some day. While following Sheena Carey, I was able to gain access to information about internships I may not have found out about on my own. I also started following certain celebrities, just for fun, like Stephen Colbert. His tweets are always good for a laugh.

I guess Twitter isn’t too bad. Now that the project’s over, I doubt I’ll update my status as much, but I’ll still use Twitter. I can learn more about multiple topics in just a few minutes, than if I spent hours surfing the web. That in itself is reason enough to keep logging on.