Authors of this study include: Gilad Lotan, big data analyst and visualist; Erhardt Graeff, grad student and researcher at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media lab; Mike Ananny, Assistant Professor at Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism; Devin Gaffney, ; Ian Pearce; and Danah Boyd, who I’ve written on earlier in the course. Lotan dealth with the topic of Social Flow within the overall study, while both Graeff and Pearce worked on the Web Ecology Project. Ananny and Boyd worked on Microsoft Research regarding the Arab Spring Revolutions.
The article overall revolved around the relationship between Twitter and the Arab Spring. There is special attention given to the role Twitter played in comparison to mainstream media — and whether online tools such as blogging and Twitter began to replace mainstream media as the source of information. The authors propose that “Twitter and other social media tools can be leveraged to spread information,” and that, “social media may have the potential to provoke and sustain political uprisings by amplifying particular news and information” (5). Through an analysis of data collected from Twitter during the heights of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, they were able to conclude that:
news on Twitter is being co-constructed by bloggers and activists alongside journalists. This confirms the notion that Twitter supports distributed conversation among participants and that journalism, in this era of social media, has become a conversation (Gillmor, 2004). Specifically, in the context of a major news event like a natural disaster (Sutton, Palen, & Shklovski, 2008) or the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, these conversations involve a host of interested parties.
These findings can help shed light on the true role of social media in influencing news media online. It also begs the question of how Twitter should be used, and whether it can be an appropriate tool to disseminate information to the greater public. We must also consider whether or not it is better or worse that these news stories are presented in a bias format.
Overall, I can’t help but think of the previous article I read, in which Ulises Mejias argued against this idea of Twitter as a determinant in the Arab Spring uprisings. Yet, Lotan et al. does provide substantial evidence arguing otherwise. It’s hard to truly come up with a definitive answer on whether Twitter and other social media sites did in fact provide the medium for revolution to arise.
When it comes to the relationship between news dissemination and the role of online journalists, I found it interesting that the article said individual journalists sometimes had a greater rate of dissemination than news organizations. There seems to be this rise in individualized identity online. Rather than following news organizations, or corporations, social media users tend to lean toward more “personal” accounts. When I say “personal,” I am talking about this illusion of online journalists having an independent voice online — the tweets and photos we see of these celebrities come from the people themselves, making it seem more “honest” and “open.” The “personal” touch of this can influence readers to follow and trust the tweeters more. It could be this rise in individualized journalism that helped to disseminate information regarding the Arab Spring. Especially when you consider the political atmosphere at the time, it only seems logical that those involved in the uprisings would rather trust the voice of individuals, rather than listen to organized media — it was a political institution in the first place that gave rise to the injustice in these countries.
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