Twitter Becomes Mainstream – Bad For Geeks, Good For The World?
By Lon S. Cohen
Hillary Clinton said she didn’t know a “Twitter from a tweeter, but apparently, it is very important” when the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a planned maintenance outage so they could stay online throughout the Iranian protesters could continue to tweet out their ire and plight to the world. It occurred to me when I heard this that something amazing happened: Twitter jumped over the proverbial jumping of the shark.
When @AplusK went on @oprah to explain Twitter to her everyone in the United States (plus some people abroad I assume) with a living room, a television and a reason to be sitting home on a weekday (which is apparently a little over 9% of eligible U.S. workers as of May, 2009) went to their laptops and opened an account. Twitter had reached mainstream. Some claimed that this was the end of their beloved mini blogging service. Others said that the fun was just starting. Judging by the ever increasing population of accounts opened and then immediately abandoned or the most obvious trailing indicator, by the number of porn spammers signing up, it seemed that Twitter had indeed jumped the shark – or was close to becoming too mainstream for the digiterati. But Twitter seems to have a life of its own and for a service of such simplicity, it’s really quite complex. Despite headlines that read “Twitter Close To Completely Useless” claiming that the old 80/20 rule (in this case 90/10 but who’s counting?) was something brand new and made the service a passing fad (consider that the entire internet probably conforms to the 80/20 rule and we might as well toss the whole system into the trash heap) Twitter actually was becoming more useful, more important. At least that’s what the U.S. Government thinks along with hundreds of Iranian protesters and the people who are following them.
The mainstreaming of Twitter, bringing it into the public eye in such a faddish fashion actually empowered the people of Iran to use the service to communicate to the world. While foreign journalists were quarantined and forbidden by the Iranian government from reporting on the growing violence, digital cameras, smart phones and Twitterers were broadcasting the revolution in the streets, reporting for themselves on the goings on and essentially bringing a light onto this event that might have been successfully closed off by Mr. Ahmadinejad. If we didn’t have Twitter and it wasn’t so much in the public eye then we might never have heard from the people on the streets of Tehran that they were unsatisfied with the way their country’s elections turned out, or that a large, vocal group of young people were willing to risk life and limb to make their voices heard. Twitter was there for them when a totalitarian regime tried to silence their voices. A hashtag (#iranelection) to follow the events was quickly adopted and millions of people now use Twitter as a primary source of information of this phenomenon halfway across the world.
In Brian Stelter’s New York Times article “In Coverage of Iran, Amateurs Take the Lead” Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and a native of Iran said, “You can’t keep any of this news down anymore, and that’s a huge change from the past. The process of getting the word out is totally democratized.”
While we’re at it let’s hold a mirror up to this event. Over the weekend when the Iranian elections declared Ahmadinejad the winner, people took to the streets immediately. CNN hadn’t begun covering the news. On Twitter, people began complaining about it using the hashtag #cnnfail. This most definitely got the attention of the reporters, producers and executives at the station and they quickly worked to rectify the situation. But the fact that they were trumped in news coverage by Twitter or at least the rumblings of how big this event was going to be came directly from Iranians Twittering says something about the quantification atomization of news today.
Even more important was the fact that people on Twitter were using the platform to protest to CNN that their coverage of the Iran protests was insufficient. People outside of Iran used this democratic process to get action from a mainstream media station about the protesters inside Iran using that same democratic process to get their story heard. Both sides were clamoring to be connected. People quickly realized that indeed they were connected and while following the links, tweets and videos that were coming out of Iran to piece together the full story may have been taxing even on the most plugged in user, at least a direct connection existed and it bypassed the traditional thoroughfare.
According to Stetler’s story a CNN correspondent said that even though they couldn’t independently verify the stuff coming out of Iran, “we feel it’s important that people see this, see and hear what is coming into us.” CNN even took to showing YouTube videos of “of the aftermath of an apparent raid at Tehran University” according to the Stetler. He added that the visas of many foreign journalists expire this week. “As they depart the country,” he wrote, “amateur video is expected to take on even more importance.
Why CNN? The station that cut its teeth in Tiananmen Square and became noticed during their coverage of events leading up to and during the first Iraqi war has been extremely active on Twitter even going toe-to-toe in a race to 1,000,000 followers with none other than @AplusK himself, though all in the name of charity – Ashton Kutcher promised to donate mosquito nets to people who needed them if he won. Even when CNN found out that a user was tweeting out links to their web items under their brand name on Twitter they didn’t flinch. What they did was offer the guy a job! That’s the kind of behavior I’d expect of CNN. In a recent #journchat on Twitter I commented that, “CNN was upstart news channel that proved itself with first Iraq conflict in early ’90s. Is Twitter the SM version?”
Remember when CNN was an upstart station? When they weren’t just an alternative to Fox News and cable news meant 24-hour news cycle. Yes, you can argue that the over analysis of the OJ Simpson trial and the Clinton/Lewinsky affair were low points in cable news but there is surely a need and a desire on the part of the public for a media channel to provide a constant flow of information from around the world.
Cable news was at its best with big breaking news stories, keeping us on the edge of our seats, feeding us every little detail no matter how small, not because it was important to the overall picture but because that’s what we wanted. In the case of Iran’s protesters, it’s probably more of a case of what we needed. We don’t need to know what @AplusK or @oprah thinks every moment of every day, but we do need to know that there are hundreds of young Iranians protesting an election in their own country, especially when their government tries to shut them up.
This is how the world will get its news from now on. Not through big cable news stories feeding live streams of commentary from professional reporters but in drips and drabs and 140-character sets, cell phone pictures and videos. At least that’s how it will start. We will be informed of the next event just like we got the first pictures from an iPhone photo uploaded to Twitter when a US Air flight ditched into the Hudson or when terrorists attacked in Mumbai or when Iran tried to silence its populace.
In the meantime mainstream media has some work to do. They’ve probably already figured that they need to keep their antennas tuned to services like Twitter and if they haven’t then shame on them because Twitter has proved its usefulness for signaling a breaking news story many times over. But what they really have to do is figure out how they are going to parse that information, verify it and use it in a newscast. I suggested in the same #journchat news outlets need “a front line SM fact check/reporter? Checking on Twitter stream leads. That’d be a good job for a new journo!”
So while geeks are grumbling that their Twitter has lost its exclusivity and being soiled by the unwashed masses, I have to say that this has probably been the greatest thing to happen to the service since it started. It has made Twitter not just more interesting, it’s made Twitter imperative.