94% of CCN Users Don’t use Twitter… and???

Brian Wiegand’s twitter linked to an article on Mashable.com claiming that most (94%) of CNN.com’s website do not use Twitter.

I’m not sure if I think this is a non-issue or a negative statement. To break up the statistics a little, about 60% of the users said they do not use Twitter by choice while about 30% say they do no know what Twitter is.

While interesting, I’m not sure this says very much. I know that one of my biggest challenges of is to get news digested down to the basics of what I want, strip out as much noise (adversiting/weather/teasers) as I can, get the content, and move on.

Toward that end, I tend to get most of my news through audio sources. It’s not that they are ad- or teaser-free, but I can cook dinner or craft up route emails while the news is flowing. The win with Twitter is that the character limit is so small that users cannot waste time. The win with radio or pod casts is that I can multitask.

Those who know me are probably saying, “Multitasking, I thought Sam hated multitasking!” Well… sort of. If you multitask, you do two things poorly rather than one thing excellently. Continuous Partial Attention is simply a disaster. News is, quite simply, not very imporant, at least not the headlines. When I’m listening to news, I skim headlines and gather a list to look up later and become conversent on.

Really! Think about the thousands of news stories you have heard this year and ask yourself, how many of them changed my behavior? I can honestly say that the only story that changed my behavior was the swine flu focus. I washed my hands more and I tried to get back onto a regular patter of sleep because I knew I should.

So full circle: Is it of any real interest that CNN users do not get their news via Twitter? I don’t think it is a huge revelation. I think they are wasting their time if they are watching a TV, and wasting bandwidth if they go to the site, but if they enjoy the experience, really what is the impact? The sad truth is that modern media is so far reaching that the stories are too far removed from my day-to-day to really impact me at all, and I count myself somewhat fortunate to have have this pointed out to me and to have pruned nightly news from sucking up the little precious time I have.

I only get 75 years to enjoy this life. It’s silly to waste so much of it.