Here at ChicagoNow, we don't have fancy multitouch 50-inch LED screens (yes, John King, I'm jealous). But we did watch President Obama's State of the Union speech.
Before I chime in with my reasoned analysis (I have none, since there is too much noise, too little detail and the panel CNN has assembled is already starting to fight), I'll admit I don't have any. That line was for you, Mr. Markley.
What I can offer, is my random, un-scientific analysis of cruising some of the front pages of the most trafficked Web sites in the land. A quick CTRL+F revealed immigration noticeably absent from most of them. It's true that we are fighting two wars, swimming deeper in red ink every day and on the precipice of abandoning some form of health care reform. But hey, I was curious.
So here is my analysis, of CNN's social media "analysis," which offered no explanation for how they sorted more than 100,000 tweets to determine which were positive, negative or indifferent. As you and I both know, digital communication has a hard time with tone and at times satire.
What was interesting was to see how few people actually cared about the State of the Union. A helpful methodology would have included how many people were tweeting about #SOTU. For most of Wednesday, the world (and yours truly) was drooling over the announcement and subsequent details of the Apple iPad (people apparently still have interest in spoofing it's name). And after, I spent a good hour listening to Arianna Huffington talk at length at Columbia College about the groundbreaking projects the site has in store, including a college network. She also had some advice which I will heed soon: Get some sleep!
So thanks CNN, for aggregating Twitter and Facebook statuses to tell us what we really think. Kudos for integrating social media in such an innovative way. We're getting there. And you provided my favorite reaction to the reactions.
Filed under: First takes, Politics, Social media
Tags: CNN, iPad, John King, morons, social media, Stephen Markley, Twitter
