Tuesday night, instead of watching the World Series game, I experienced real-time media another way: I followed election results on Twitter, via the #Maine hashtag, which tracked the results of Maine's Proposition 1, which if passed would ban gay marriage.

Like the baseball commentators in our textbook, Twitter is theoretically an impartial commentator on events - since it's open to anyone, opposing views should balance each other out. However, like the commentators reporting the game from the point of view of the Cubs, a quirk of demographics meant Twitter reported election results almost exclusively from the point of view of the No on Prop 1 crowd - gay marriage supporters. Because of this, the three and a half hours I spent watching the numbers come in on the internet had a clear plot. It was a close race, and as the numbers went up and down the good people of Twitter reported it with either optimism (when No was winning) or despair (when Yes pulled ahead), finally ending in tragic disappointment when Yes declared victory, around 2am. There was an antagonist - Yes on 1, but also the occasional anti-gay-marriage Twitter user, whose posts were met with angry replies. There was mimesis - re-tweets of major updates with commentary from the users on their importance. And of course there was chronicle, with at least three people posting the new numbers from each precinct as they were released.

Especially interesting was the fact that, as a source of news, Twitter was much more reliable than the actual news programing on TV - the internet had consistantly updated numbers, while CNN had outdated numbers maybe once an hour, which the anchor reported with very little interest. It was probably much more impartial and fact-checked, but the combination of real-time updates and some kind of plot made following Twitter more appealing.