I don’t tweet, and it did actually take me forever to understand why people were using hash tags on Facebook. Facebook is enough waste of my time, I do not need to add to that with other social medias. I’m sure I’m missing out on some things by not tweeting, but we all make choices. Despite my non-tweeting, I really liked the article “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions” that was posted in the International Journal of Communication. The peer-reviewed academic journal posted this article that was an in-depth review of how tweets were used and who was using them.
The article was fascinating! It discussed how tweets were used in the Egyptians revolution to convey messages and encourage riots and gatherings. This is nothing new to me though; social media is the way to organize events these days. I wouldn’t be able to remember my own mother’s birthday if it wasn’t for Facebook (that might be an exaggeration). What I did find interesting is how many tweets were actually done by professionals and how information was truly being spread through this social media. I’ve been beat over the head to check my sources before believing what I hear (proof of that point is below). It does seem a little strange to me that a lot of people rely on such sites for important information. The article actually says that scholars “question whether Twitter is a social media service or a news medium”
The obvious answer is both. As someone who gets the majority of her news from Facebook (I know, it’s horrible, but I don’t watch TV either, and I do enough reading for school, it’s the last thing I want to do when I’m done), I am well aware that social media is one of the main sources of information for the youth of today. I wonder if everyone Google’s information they find on social media sites (like I do, when I care), or if they rely on this information they receive? Remember the fake Martin Luther King quote? It is easy for something that is not true to make it’s way around the world before anyone realizes that it is not true.
Boring stuff I have to include to get the full credit for this blog in my class, but I feel deters from the flow of my blog, so I’m putting it at the end:
The article was a collaboration of six different researchers from varying backgrounds including Microsoft Researchers and three members of the Web Ecology Project. The head author Gilad Lotan was born in Israel and studied both computer science and design, and he has several articles about social media being used in political uprisings. The International Journal of Communication is published out of the University of Southern California.