My brother Gregg and his wife Angella live on a mountainside in Fish Hoek overlooking the main swimming beach. On a balmy summer’s day their lounge window frames an idyllic picture: a stretch of white beach lining an azure coastline littered with bathers, surfers and tourists.
From such a height the people on the beach below resemble the miniature figurines populating a model train set or the busy layout of a Where’s Wally? picture book.
About 3.30pm last Tuesday, Gregg and Angella heard a commotion on the beach and ran outside to see what was happening. They spotted a giant shadow about 6m long in the bay, gunning towards a colourful bobbing object — but were unable to make out whether this object was a bather, a buoy or a beach ball.
We now know the shadow was a great white shark.
Gregg and Angella saw the creature break the waves and wrap its jaws around the bobbing object before submerging itself again and taking the object with it.
Being the techno-savvy guy he is, with iPhone permanently attached to hip, Gregg tweeted the sighting on microblogging portal Twitter almost as fast as it seemed to have happened. His first tweet read: “Tue 12 Jan at 15:40: Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person right in front of our house in fishhoek. Unbelievable.”
Seven minutes later he posted an update: “Tue 12 Jan at 15:47: We are dumbstruck, that was so surreal. That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge.”
Further tweets over the next few hours recorded the arrival of the emergency services and confirmation that the colourful bobbing lump was indeed a person.
What is both fascinating and disturbing is to see was how quickly these tweets were snapped up by internet news agencies and how fast news can get around via the rapid and tangled broadband grapevine. Like a bunch of dumbstruck pedestrians rubber-necking round a car wreck, the world began hanging on to Gregg’s every tweet.
“Haai skeur glo persoon in twee! [Shark apparently tears person in two]” screamed one of the Afrikaans headlines. “There was blood everywhere,” reported another.
“Hey, I didn’t say there was blood,” Gregg protested moments after his tweets started to appear in Afrikaans. “Those aren’t my words.”
“Sorry —” shrugged the journo responsible. “Must have got you confused with another eyewitness I had spoken to.”
In what seemed to be an instant, his first tweet — “Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person” — began appearing in 11 official languages, cut and pasted into headlines, most of which were “embellished” rather than “lost” in translation.
News website headlines began to evolve by the minute. Gregg’s description of the shark as “a giant shadow” and “dinosaur” were declared in bold type accompanied by regiments of exclamation marks.
In the space of two hours, Gregg was flailing in the deep end of a media feeding frenzy. The phone was ringing off the hook, radio stations (as far as Australia) requesting interview after interview.
“Oh my god,” gushed a Twitter devotee, “this is nuts, you’re like the Twitter equivalent of Susan Boyle.”
I logged on to the net shortly after I heard about the tragedy (ironically through a Facebook message left by a friend living in San Francisco) — and what a disturbing demonstration of hack hunter-gathering it turned out to be.
After a few hours the dinosaur simile was considered a bit passé and prehistoric and the headline honchos now required fresh soundbites to set their Google stats soaring. So they pressed him for more details and in an interview with the Cape Times he reluctantly obliged, this time with a revised description of the beast.
“It [the shark] was longer than a minibus and the rubber ducks lifeguards use.” And that was that! “Minibus” and “rubber ducks” became the new buzzwords of the hour, promptly appropriated and mangled to suit news sites’ nefarious means. In retrospect, I’m surprised not a single journo took the liberty to stitch together a sensational headline from the words giant, killer, prehistoric and rubber duck.
For the most of Tuesday evening, the victim remained an international man of mystery and holder of multiple passports. First he was cited as a Capetonian, later a citizen of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), then of Mozambique, and finally as a Zimbabwean. It took until Wednesday morning for the deceased to be officially confirmed as Lloyd Skinner, a 37-year-old Zimbabwean from Harare living in the DRC and holidaying in Cape Town.
By Wednesday morning Gregg’s tweets were on lampposts and newspaper front pages across the planet including the Guardian, Sky News and Norway’s top newspaper — where a Google translation from Norwegian into English distorts one of his Twitter headline quotes to read: “We saw a giant shark eating up anything that seemed to be a person outside our house.”
Two days later, close to 400 new followers had signed up to his Twitter account. Now, although I admit Gregg is a super-interesting and dynamic guy, this is a pretty horrific set of expectations on which to have to follow up.
With his 15 minutes of Twitter infamy, one suspects that his hordes of new disciples are following him up the cyber mountain in the hope that he’ll witness and report on this sort of Discovery Channel carnage every second day of the week.
So what’s next on his tweet agenda? “Seagulls assail Kalk Bay fishermen”? “Rabid seal on the loose terrorising Fish Hoek pensioners”? “Demented penguin holds Pick n Pay shoppers hostage”?
Watch this space and remember that if there’s a lesson to be learnt here, it’s this: be very careful what you tweet about.
Neil Coppen is a playwright and freelance journalist from Durban