Twitter has been in the media a lot in recent months. Surgery Live was the second of three experiments to come out of Channel 4’s cross-platform department using this increasingly popular ‘microblogging’ service in connection with television programmes. The experiment reflects the increasingly common habit of ‘Twittering’ whilst watching TV, plugging in to that behaviour in the context of a bold, educative factual television series – importantly a live one.

Twitter, if it hasn’t crossed your path, is a website from which you can send short messages (of up to 140 characters) to a network of people who are interested in similar things to you or who choose to follow your short messages or ‘tweets’.

When I first saw Twitter a few years ago I thought it was the end of civilisation as we know it. Since then I’ve come to see it as a tool in search of a purpose and I’ve now commissioned three experiments (Osama Loves,  Surgery Live and the forthcoming Alone in the Wild – watch this space) that have been about applying the Twitter tool to a worthwhile mission or purpose.

Surgery Live, broadcast in May, used Twitter to enable viewers to ask questions and discuss live the surgical procedures featured in the series. Viewers were invited to watch a selection of four fascinating operations live at around 11pm each night of the Surgery Live week. From open heart surgery to awake brain surgery to keyhole surgery, viewers were invited to ask questions of the surgeons via Twitter (or email or phone), all filtered via the production team and then posed through the intermediary of the presenter, arch-Twitterer Krishnan Guru-Murthy… A matter of seconds between tweet and the question being asked on live TV.

There is of course a long and honourable tradition of surgeons talking and teaching whilst operating and every effort was made to make the Twittering aspect of Surgery Live no more distracting than that normal medical training practice.

So viewers were encouraged to tweet away during the live operations, sharing their thoughts and asking questions. The big difference from the few previous experiments in this area is that this was live TV and so viewers were able to make an impact on the actual TV editorial. Now of course there are echoes of phone-ins and combining TV with forums/chatrooms the best part of a decade ago (notably by Danny Baker on Channel 4) but what this new generation of social media brings is a networked conversation, which is global, searchable, tagable and open. In other words, unlike emails, text messages or phones, you can join in a discussion among numerous people from right across the UK and beyond – fellow viewers, experts, medical students, enthusiasts, all manner of interested parties – live and simultaneously.

One measure of Surgery Live’s impact online was that it ‘trended’ #1, #2# or #3 on Twitter every night – that is, for a while around transmission was the 1st, 2nd or 3rd most popular topic globally. Another is that by the second night, if you googled the word “surgery” the Surgery Live website showed up number 2 of 121 million results.

But to get a real sense of how the Surgery Live experiment panned out, I leave it to the words of our viewers/participants.

• philroberts: #slive this could be one of the best models for twitter, live interactive feedback brilliant twitter was a great enhancement to the show
• manpreet1: Surgery live on channel 4, and #slive, was a great use of a new format.
• bruceelrick: @wellcometrust it was a great success on twitter. #slive now 3rd most popular trend on twitter – pretty great achievement!
• J_Dizzle_: just watched heart surgery live on channel 4, twitter questions and updates.. very well done. #slive