Twitter lingerers

One aspect of Twitter that really fascinates me is the news lingering by some users. For example, 2-3 days after Michael Jackson died, you could still find people tweeting such things as 'holy crap, Michael Jackson died.' Now, unless this person had just arisen from a coma, then they almost certainly knew that Michael Jackson was dead well in advance of posting that tweet, and certainly should have known that the rest of the world did as well, since the news coverage of Jackson's death seemed to exceed that of 9/11. But for some reason, the user somehow feels obligated to report on this news, despite the fact that it is already well known. I can only imagine that the reason for tweeting such a thing at that point in time would be because the user was not able to access their Twitter account for those few days, and felt obligated to throw their two cents into the community no matter how chronologically useless the information was.

I think there's a certain robot mentality at play here--a mentality that is already rampant throughout social networks--but now it has morphed into something else: people are becoming automated in their thought processes, and the technology--as well as the desire to be a part of that technology--is driving it. Rather than be an independent, creative part of that herd, users are becoming more and more content to linger and robotically feed on repeatable content based on the current trending topics or what is deemed important by the Twitter community. Technology is influencing, maybe even dictating, the autonomy of our choices. And it's making a lot of people look really dumb. Michael Jackson died three days ago? No shit, Sherlock.