The article, “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptain Revolutions” discusses how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading timely information across the globe. It details the networked production and dissemination of news on Twitter during snapshots of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions as seen through information flows across activists, bloggers, journalists, mainstream media outlets, and other engaged participants. The contributors of the article describe the symbolic relationship between media outlets and individuals and the distinct roles particular user types appear to play.
SocialFlow Logo. Source: SocialFlow
Web Ecology Project Logo.Source: WEP
Microsoft Research Logo. Source: Microsoft
There are six contributors to this article, all of whom come from different organizations. Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development at SocialFlow, a leading social media marketing company offering businesses and brands a solutions-based approach to connecting paid, owned and earned social media strategies. Erhardt Graeff (lead Researcher and Developer), Devin Gaffney (Co-Director), and Ian Pearce (researcher), are all associated with The Web Ecology Project, which is an interdisciplinary research group based in Boston, Massachusetts focusing on using large scale data mining to analyze the system-wide flows of culture and community online. Mike Ananny and Danah Boyd are researchers for Microsoft Research, a company dedicated to conducting both basic and applied research in computer science and software engineering.
Twitter was launched in 2006 and was designed to let participants post short 140 character updates that could easily be circulated via text messages. The appeal of Twitter goes back to our previous readings from Jakob Nielsen regarding the appeal of print versus Web. The main lesson taken from Nielsen’s articles is the importance of condensed, eye-catching titles made up of very few words that will catch the reader’s attention. Twitter has this very same idea in mind: an outlet available for non-professional journalists, reporters, etc. to post on current news.
Mainstream media outlets have utilized Twitter to engage and enlarge audiences and as a result have changed how people rely and republish sources. Twitter was specifically used during the Tunisian and Egyptain uprisings to learn from on-the-ground sources and rapidly distribute updates. Both revolutions featured prominent use of social media, especially Twitter, by activists organizing the demonstrations and those discussing news of events locally or globally. Twitter served as both a common medium for professional journalism and citizen journalism and as a site for global information flow.
Twitter Logo. Source: Twitter
While Twitter is affective in getting the message out, is all the information given completely reliable? Or is there too much input coming from the emerging networked actors who remix and interpret the mainstream news stories? How do we know when the information given on Twitter follows the original content and isn’t too interpreted?
Perhaps the focus should instead be on the fact that Twitter is enabling and encouraging interaction amongst its users an enabling information flow. The article gives an example of the 2009 Iranian election when users took to Twitter to alter their profile images so that they were tinted green, the color of the revolution.
In my opnion, Twitter is not used to necessarily bring out factual information. Instead, many people use it to express their opinions and feelings toward certain events or miscellaneous things. For example, in the journal that we read, it was found that about 25% of tweeters regarding the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolution are considered in the “other” category of actor type. This shows that many of these tweeters are regular people who are witnessing these events from a far point of view. They may know certain facts about the events, or may want to know more. So I would assume that, as you said, Twitter is allowing people to interact and communicate about information.