@KM Considering I got burned like bad tires for being "holier-than-thou", thought I'd give me two cents.
Being a journalist for about five years now, I spent the whole of last evening trawling through twitter to figure out what the general mood was.
By my calculations, a vast majority of the reaction to the debacle was deep sadness. I wondered why there wasn't enough anger involved. I mean, a passenger plane was blown out of the sky FFS! Shouldn't there be riots across the capitals in Europe by now? A missile shot down 298 people from the sky - innocents!
All this goes to show is that though Twitter has the undeniable ability to unite a large numbver of voices, it also stands in danger of making tweets less emotional and more based on trends. The data has begun to show that the more people log into twitter and upon seeing reaction, continue a similar reaction with their own tweets.
Of course, plenty of people have original thoughts. And I would suppose that most of these people are genuinely hurt and they're merely showing their sadness. However, if what I think is going on is true, slowly over time Twitter will get more and more unoriginal. Leaving it in danger of being a recycler of news and emotion rather than opinion.
Sorry lads if I derailed any conversation. Just my observation regarding Twitter.