I started with a broad topic, the impact of twitter on the investment world, but after some research and brainstorming, I plan to narrow my topic down to the impulsive responses caused by twitter. As we had mentioned in class, twitter increases the velocity of information as it has created a platform for instantaneous communication amongst all corners of the World Wide Web. I hope to create a video that is most closely associated with the rhetorical goal of being informative.
Using the TAGS program, it is apparent that there twitter has a strong hold in the investment world unlike any other social media product on the shelves today. As would be predicted, many of the tweets in my archive seemed to represent some form of advertising or marketing. Traders on wall street are always looking for a competitive edge just like many athletes do. Many turned to faster network speeds, in hopes of a small edge over one’s competitors. As politicians have talked about in the past, many firms trade based on algorithms that are carried out by computers, faster than any human could even imagine. This raises concerns for the individual investors, or less equipped firms.
Twitter has been able to somewhat fill this gap, mostly by providing up to the second news to anyone who cares to listen, which ranges from high level professionals to your everyday kid. Fundamental and technical analysis still has its place in investing, but tends to be accessible by all players. This is why big firms have invested in speed, in hopes of gaining a small window to make only very small gains percentage wise over the course of many trades throughout the day.
With this stress on speed of execution, twitter has speed up the process of spreading news to the hands of anyone watching. This has only added to what many people would call “impulse” buying. There are numerous examples of both how this has been good and bad. The good being those who have gained knowledge on twitter and then went on to make money off of that. However, it is unclear whether the negative effects outweigh the positive ones. The most notable flaw was seen after, “A hacked Twitter account of a major news organization Tuesday dispelled any lingering notion that tweets are mere 140-character missives that harmlessly fly off into the ether….The FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the security breach that momentarily sent stocks into free fall Tuesday, erasing some $200 billion from the market's value.” This was all caused by a hacker entering the Associated Press’s twitter account to announce “breaking news” that the white house was bombed on April 23, 2013.
This highlights the idea so eloquently put by the USA Today staff when they stated, “Fresh off last week's deadly Boston Marathon attacks, the Texas fertilizer facility explosion and fear inspired by ricin-laced letters mailed to the president and congressional leaders, the hoax underscored a great vulnerability in our 24/7 faster-is-better news environment: stories (even fake ones) travel at light speed and can in an instant upend an increasingly anxious public's faith in business, government and the news media.” The article later talks about peoples inability to sift through the true and false information on the internet, but even more so on twitter. The article stated, "This is yet another reminder that social media isn't simply banal messages about breakfast between teenagers, but that it can have massive, real-world consequences," says Jeff Hancock, a Cornell University communications and information science professor. "Our trust of social media has reached new levels. (Wall Street's) response also highlights that humans have a built-in truth bias to believe what others say. Although there is a lot of suspicion about the Internet in general, the truth bias is alive and well with social media."
Money never slept as even before the days of twitter, but now the information moves as quickly as the money. Investing has always been about risk and reward, but as the global market place equilibrates, many investors are looking for an edge, and that edge can be speed, which ultimately can be facilitated by twitter. In my video I will try to almost simulate this event that took place on April 23rd by using a combination of tweets, my archive of tweets relating to my topic, article excerpts, and maybe most powerfully scenes from “money never sleeps” and “the boiler room.”
At this point I don’t have many concerns besides becoming comfortable with camtasia.
Article referred to in proposal:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/23/hack-attack-on-asso...
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