Lee De Forest's Audion

I caught myself wondering today whether Twitter might be the new Audion.

You remember the Audion, right? It was a little doohickey invented by Lee De Forest in 1906 that amplified electric currents, and ended up making things like long-distance telephony, radio and ultimately computers possible.

One of the cooler things about it was that De Forest had no idea it would do any of that. He was just futzing about in his workshop one day and added an extra wire to a diode to see what it would do. Though I believe he patented it, its effects were mostly the result of what other people did with it.

I was not alone in not really getting it when Twitter hit the mainstream a couple years ago. It seemed silly. Email and Facebook were already instant. I didn’t really cotton on to the significance of its broadcast aspect and my judgment was clouded by Ashton Kutcher and the less-faux-than-usual intimacy it provided between fans and idols.

And if you look at the most followed people, it’s this intimacy that is still driving the biggest numbers. On Thursday, Lady Gaga was tops, with 9,599,058 followed, Justin Bieber was second with 9,195,163 and Britney Spears was third with 7,605,758. (Obama’s fourth, but after that, you have to go down to No. 21 and 4,198,428 followers, CNN Breaking News, to get a non-celeb.)

But as Twitter evolves, it’s looking like volume of followers is not really the thing. After several months of using it as a journalist, following people and companies who might give me leads for stories, and re-tweeting up-to-the-second stuff from Libya or Bahrain or, most gruesomely, Syria, I thought I was starting to get Twitter’s effect on and utility for journalism.

Then I read Kady O’Malley’s story on Wednesday about the Conservatives and a potentially bogus photo of Michael Ignatieff.

O’Malley’s already got a reputation among other journalists as being mistress of the tweets. I started to follow her after the third or fourth breathless recommendation. But I unfollowed her a about a week later, frustrated by the number of fragments she’d tweet that required me to follow every damn thing she posted in order to understand anything. If she was the mistress, I figured, I’d be happier being master of my own domain.

But this recent story of the Ignatieff pic put all those fragments together for me, following the development of the story in Twitter form, her own tweets and others’, with a line or two of context between them. Not only did I get the story, I got how the story developed. She let me in on the actual trail of secondary sources, and because they were in bits of 140 characters or less, it even made for a good read.

The alleged Ignatieff picture plant is not an especially groundbreaking story, but it is interesting, and the way O’Malley harvested the tweets and stuck them in a more stable document that people who don’t follow her or @natnewswatch or @glen_mcgregor can make sense of made me think that a new, more tangibly vital kind of journalism was afoot, one that could lead in any number of directions.

It’s unreasonable to expect people will follow journalists following their stories in anything like the numbers they read newspapers and magazines. It’s just not that interesting. We like the idea that we could, but I don’t think we actually do, except in brief exciting spurts when people are actually getting shot at while punching their slim strings of characters into their Blackberry. But when a journalist draws a map, using those otherwise unexciting non-war-zone tweets as co-ordinates, that’s a different thing entirely.

It’s not a big leap to imagine a similar story, of greater import, linking to primary sources and documents as the journalist tracks the story herself. It’d be fun to follow along in real time, of course, if you’re into that sort of thing, but the important point is it’s not necessary — Twitter can be the tool, and not the medium itself. The sort of pastiche that O’Malley posted on Wednesday supplies not only the sense, but the evidence of its immediacy, while allowing for a bit of time for contemplation, confirmation and the imposition of a narrative. And a bit of time is all a journalist has ever needed.

In fact, the process presents a reasonable facsimile of newspaper journalism at its best, or at least its most vibrant: the last years of the 19th century, in New York, when papers like the Journal and the World would have 20 or 30 daily editions so as to track the big stories, like the Spanish-American War. (I’ve not read a better blow-by-blow of this era than in Ken Whyte’s biography of William Randolph Hearst.)

During the Spanish-American War, journalists in Havana or Florida would telegraph head office with the latest development, and it would arrive within an hour or two of the event in question; the new information would be slotted into an updated version of the pre-existing story, and be on the streets about an hour after that.

Margaret Atwood has already remarked on the similarity between tweets and telegrams. But in journalists’ hands, tweets are becoming a latter-day version of the sort of action journalism that used to make the whole enterprise so exciting.