The media loves drunk Tweeting

Never drink and tweet. If you do, you might start a revolution. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (who knows better) downed two of glasses of pinot and logged on anyway. It promptly resulted in the “#F*ckYouWashington” uprising on Twitter. First Jarvis wrote: “Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.” Then, between guzzling more wine, he wrote: "Can we start a Twitter chant: FUCK YOU, WASHINGTON! Pass it on." They did. And a big Trending Topic was born. The media picked it up and jabbered about it all morning. Naturally, they trotted the clip of Howard Beale from the movie Network ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!"). The media assumption: The whole country is on Twitter. Ergo, isn't this funny everyone? Let's play the tape again! Then, let's bring on the talking heads to talk about it! Gosh, isn't this fun? There's just one problem: only 13 percent of the US online population uses Twitter. Much of the other 87% is all like "Tweeter wha'?" And of the folks on Twitter, only 21% are active users. Of that subset, 23% are responsible for 90% of all Tweets. And (trust me on this) a good portion of those are from reporters. So, on the Great Jarvis Insurrection, the media was mostly talking to itself (again). The rest of us were at HBO or otherwise having a life.