Social Media Roll in Arab Spring. Source: OpenIdeo

Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, danah boyd explain the roles of various user-types (i.e. media, bloggers, activists), and how they came together and their relationships through the ICT: Twitter to amplify Arab Spring in their article The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions published in the International Journal of Communication 2011: Volume 5.

This article introduces the notion of narrow-cast media as opposed to traditional broadcast media and analyzes two different data sets from both the Tunisian Demonstration and the Egyptian Demonstration. The article served to state the importance of information flow through Twitter for both citizen and professional journalism so much so that the Egyptian government denied citizens access to it from January 26th – February 2nd (Egypt’s Revolution).

The article, after analyzing quantitatively the flow of tweets and re-tweets that journalists and activists serve as primary information sources whereas bloggers and users are information routers. What this suggests is that while Twitter users may be adding their own political commentary and more quickly transferring information from user to user, the primary source of information parallels real-life in the sense that journalists and activists are still the primary source of information.

Also, unlike activists and bloggers, journalists primarily re-tweet journalists: this makes sense since journalists have higher standards as to their sources of information offline.  However, like tends to like for other user-types as well (i.e. journalists tend to re-tweet other journalists and bloggers other bloggers).

After analyzing the contents of the post qualitatively, the article concludes that the content itself is co-constructed and that the revolution was indeed tweeted: in other words, content has become more of a discussion and dynamic than offline. I imagine this as similar to playing a game of telephone at a dinner table. What we can take from this article is that Twitter serves as a great medium to aide discussion and allow users whether they are journalists, bloggers, activists, users to easily flow and share information. Also, since users are likely to share those like them (with some obvious breaks in the flow), simply because of the nature of the ICT, even if parallel to real life, information reach is much quicker.