The aspect of the study highlighted in The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions is the notion that the social network, Twitter, was able to elicit an “information cascade” among it’s users in response to the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions.  From what I understand, the fact that Twitter grants it’s users with a very small space (in terms of characters used)  in which to post their comment, the messages that are presented through this social network are extremely concise with very small room for elaboration.  Therefore, the possibility that the “message” embedded in these tweets is unaltered as it travels from user to user is significantly increased.  This leads to an extremely close proximity between those experiencing the news, and those reading about it.  In other words, Twitter creates a networked news service that rivals most news organizations in terms of audience and quality of information disseminated throughout that audience.  Furthermore, because of the phenomenon of the Hashtag found in Twitter, in which users can immediately label information and tweets that are directly connected to a certain overarching topic, this action of an information is increased even more.

What does his mean for professional news organizations who conduct journalism and such services within a certain code of ethos?  It seems that it is still to early to begin answering this question, but this study attempts to begin dissecting this issue.  This quote from the study seems to sum up the dichotomous views of the kind of research that needs to be examined:

“Studies of mainstream news production can be understood in terms of two broad phases of research. The first focuses on how journalists work within formal news organizations, while the second—a newer body of literature—investigates how news emerges from networked actors who span different professional and organizational identities and contexts.”

The main focus here being the impact of individual citizen journalists being linked together rather than the typical news organization.  It will be extremely interesting to see how our perspective of the news and who should be able to present it will change with the further inclusion of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into our everyday lives.

Read the whole study HERE.