Twitter has become a social media tool that not only connects individuals with other individuals (friends, celebrities, etc) around the world, but also with organizations (@TheWhiteHouse, @HuffingtonPost). With this network of communication, much news gets transferred so quickly. We in the United States can get some information about some place across the globe in an instant.

Gilad Lotan, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, and danah body have written an article, The Revolutions Were Tweeted:Information Flows During the 2011
Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions, that addresses the effects of social media, specifically Twitter, on flow of international news information. These researchers of technology and society look at two events that occurred closely together in late 2010 and early 2011 – Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. They gathered and analyzed all the tweets that were related to the two events to discover who provides information to the world and how much of it is transmitted.

Their research shows that bloggers had more impact and reach than traditional news journalists when considering the revolution in Tunisia. In Egypt, it was reversed. Interestingly, the events in Egypt had more information than Tunisia probably because of the sources (traditional journalists) of the tweets.

I think the most interesting piece of this article is that they concluded “individuals are more successful than organizations in seeding prominent information flows, it may be that they are perceived as more trustworthy.” They point out individuals are more willing to speak out and be more liberal. There could possibly be more individual Twitter accounts than organizations. Lastly, individuals are more likely to share topics casually without getting all the details as traditional journalist (organization) would. I recall @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) has tweeted disdain for the firing of Joe Paterno from Penn State. Kutcher did not know that it had something to do with child sex abuse and had to retract his original statement. He then went on to say that he was handing over his tweets to his PR company or something so that they can “proofread” what he tweets to the world.

So I wonder who exactly decides to tweet information from the organizations such as traditional news sources. In journalism, they have to write and share ideas objectively. With that kind of restraint, our communication systems and transference of information stays the same. It takes individuals that are activists and concerned citizens of the world to push the envelope to evolve the information we put out there and receive.