The American media worked themselves into such a frenzied pirate orgy over the long Easter weekend that they forgot to check and see if the actual pirates had something to say.
During the press conference explaining just how the Navy SEALs rescued Capt. Richard Phillips, CNN and Fox spent valuable airtime reading user comments posted on their Web sites by random, excited idiots.
Other than the shadowy newsworthiness of highlighting the plague of grammatical abortions that make up a vast majority of Web 2.0 blogs and posts, this wasted TV time only confirmed my sneaking suspicion that absolutely nobody with an active wireless connection has any idea that the word "their" is not interchangeable with the word "they're."
Instead of reading about how prayerful and happy everybody was that the captain was rescued, the news stations could have been following the Web 2.0 trail left by one of the actual pirates.
Captured pirate Mohamed Abdi is a 16-year-old boy with a cell phone. You think he doesn't have a MySpace account?
Well, Abdi - who prefers to be called "Dirty Mo" or by his Twitter handle "pirate_eyes" - reportedly quit using MySpace a few months ago because the site took too long to load pages on his iPhone. His main communication outlet during the hostage standoff was on Twitter, where Mo apparently sent a bunch of Tweets both before and after his capture by U.S. military forces.
Since I was apparently one of the few American reporters who even knew about this invaluable line of communication representing the authentic voice of modern piracy, I thought that I would share with my readers some of the more interesting and potentially eye-opening Tweets Mo sent during this tense time.
jus ran up on sumthin….thought it was bigmoney Saudi boat…wtf… "al abama" sound like Arabic name….lol
@saYYidNOmAd gettin money, son
@CaadiMaaha much love…..your songz helpin me in a mad serious standoff - american navy aint playin
@saYYidNOmAd sayyid, dis dude jus jumped off tha boat. wanna ask if he likes fishsticks….lol
jus got on what they say is "destroyer" boat but it got mad honeys onboard…u kno me, I got to holla
@Mukh_tAAhr these boys jus showed me a funny-azz video…. u seen "I'm on a Boat"?
@saYYidNOmAd yo sy, I was sleepin an they shot Oumar an Nassi!! WTF!! Turn on da TV!!!!
@saYYidNOmAd I kno…I mean, we gots guns - but we from Somalia!! I stay strapped b4 I put on shoes
Quite obviously, 140 characters or less is all that one needs to sum up the myriad concerns surrounding the Somali pirate scourge just recently noticed by most Americans. Twitter and other Web 2.0 sites offer such insightful and essential inroads into the complex human issues that will come to define our times that they surely have a great deal of social import. However, I cannot stay and Tweet on this right now - I am chatting with Kim Jong-Il about how stupid a name "Bo" is for a Portuguese water dog.
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears on Tuesdays.
