According to Gilad Lotan‘s personal website, he has a background in big data, analysis, and visualization. He leads the data science team at Social Flow. Erhardt Graeff‘s research interests are in the intersections of politics, technology, and education. He is s a founding member of the Web Ecology Project. Mike Ananny‘s interests are “the public significance of systems for networked journalism. Specifically, he studies how institutional, social, technological, and normative forces both shape and reflect the design of the online press and a public right to hear”. He participated in Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Devin Gaffeney is interested in social network topography, online activism, information and communications technologies, international relations, political economy, telemetry and is a consultant for Social Flow and the Managing Director for the Web Ecology Project. Ian Pearce is not a professional footballer as the Wikipedia page says. He is somehow involved in the Web Ecology Project, but Google really doesn’t want me to visit the site. danah boyd has been previously discussed in class. She focuses on “social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society”. She is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.
Social Flow analyzes data flow on Twitter and Facebook so as to better find out how to use both spheres to their total advantage. The Web Ecology Project also analyzes online social interaction. Microsoft Research is a software research organization.
Tweet tweet.
“The Revolutions Were Tweeted” was a culmination of combined research from the above-mentioned actors and their respective organizations. Overall, they claim that news has developed with technology, but the main dynamics and models remained the same. News organizations still develop stories in a leader-follower relationship, it just happens daily. Also professional news organizations lead stories ahead of bloggers. Even though user comments create the possibility for a participatory culture, journalists are rightfully skeptical about what kind of influence user involvement should have on their work.
Twitter has added a new face to the news dynamic. It allows everyone to connect to and be a part of the news. Twitter users can relate blooming new stories to their followers and a chain reaction starts in which the billions of Twitter users can all be privy to the same information.
Between the professional news world and the Twitter sphere, a well-placed actor can control how and what information flows. The authors defined information flow as “an ordered set of near-duplicate tweets”. In essence they tracked information flows during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and divided the actors involved into twelve categories, or actor types. Finally, they analyzed how each actor type played a role in the information flows.
The authors concluded that findings on Twitter simply reflect relationships that already existed. The volatility of the uprisings may have played a factor in highlighting all of these relationships as well because it is possible that people are more inclined to participate in the Twitter culture when the political world is active.
The two main actor types were bloggers and activists. Generally, those involved will either have personal interest in the unfolding story or business interest, as in mainstream media organizations, or just a basic interest in the story.