The way information flows from one side of the world to the other is very different from a couple years ago. Traditional ways of journalism have evolved to networked digital media that is now called mainstream media. This evolution has allowed faster information flow as well as altered the way news works. With just one click of the send button on your phone to a click on the submit button on a website, one is able to spread the word about an occurrence faster than traditional media ways of televised news or radio.
In The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions by Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, and Mike Anny, they speak about the importance of mainstream media such as Twitter and Facebook in the distribution of news, as well as the role they play in helping organize mass audiences. Lotan is a contributor that is part of Social Flow, Graeff is working in the Web Ecology Project, and Anny is part of Microsoft Research. In this article, the authors speak about two revolutions that occured in Egypt and Tunisian due to the aid of Twitter and Facebook.
Through Twitter, people in favor or leaders of the uprising in Tunisian and Egypt utilized the ability of categorizing their posts through the use of hash-tags significant to the revolution such as #sidibouzid. This would allow followers to recognize that those posts or updates were significant to the movement in case they wanted to participate in it. This type of feature in Twitter proves to be a powerful tool in organizing both ideas on the web as well as organizing masses in the physical world.
I agree with the point in your blog how Twitter proves to be a powerful tool. I mentioned in mine how Twitter connects everyone in the world — Which, I feel was the case in the Tunisian & Egyptian Revolutions. Twitter is effective as a social media platform, utilizing the hashtags to start trends.