Today I read “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions” which is a study lead by Gilad Lotan, the head of R&D of SocialFlow. The study tracked who was blogging about the revolutions in Tunisian and Egyptian by filtering tweets sent with certain periods of time by key words relating to the revolution. The Tweets were then sorted into flows; a flow is when a tweet is re-posted by another user. The longest 10% of flows where kept and 1/6 of those tweets where randomly chosen, creating the data set. The study then looked at who had published each tweet, where the source was and who re-posted that tweet. The results are rather interesting. Journalist tweeters tend to re-post each other’s comments. The ‘other’ category of users (users of indeterminable goal/source) where the most common tweeters about both revolutions, with bloggers close behind.

This idea of creating revolution through services such as media is an interesting idea to me. It creates a interesting dynamic between traditional journalists and ‘amateur mobile media journalists’, which was mentioned in the study. The two groups will be contesting for attention from readers, and may create issues for creditably in the future. On the plus side, such mobile media and networked revolutions becomes much harder for governments to clamp down on information about revolutions spreading. Even with new found ability to support and share information about revolutions, there is a down side. If a government had the right tools, they could use the tweets to track down dissidents. Incorrect information could be spread with out going through the confirmation process regular journalism does. Even with these downsides, I have a feeling the democratic process and revolution process of the future will depend much more heavily upon such sites and mobile technology. We just need to make sure we can still do both without it as well.