Twittering the World for Vagabonders
By now, I’m sure everyone has heard of Twitter, the social networking micoblogging site/iPhone app/time suck that purports to connect you to your friends and your cabal to the rest of the world through succinct 140-character statements on what you had for breakfast. I remember back when Twitter was first around and everyone was sort of saying, “I don’t get it…what’s the point of a tiny blog?” And then suddenly, cascading news media outlets mentioned it and everyone was twittering, including people’s pets and celebrities and even FAKE celebrities and now stupid twitter-isms have entered people’s vocabularies (like making “twitter” a verb instead of a capitalized proper noun, eg, or, god forbid, calling your Twitter friends “tweeple.”).
Now everyone tweets or at least everyone knows about it and makes a conscious decision not to tweet, much in the same way that vegetarians consciously decide not to eat meat; everyone does it, but they shall stop. But the recent aftermath of the Iranian Election led to storming the gates on Twitter; aside from the news flying around at light speed, and various arguments between tweeple about their opinions and suggestions for improving the life of Iranians, there was a rising, seething current of dangerous mob mentality. Aside from offering an outlet for everyone who “signed” their names on ridiculous internet petitions to avoid actually taking action (And a big thank you to all Twitter users who turned their avatars green to “help” the Iranians! I bet that was super useful!), it also offered a place for people to whip themselves up, disseminate explosive opinions as fact, and not check what was really going on.
I remember thinking, “Gosh, it’s awfully hard to fit a fact-checked statement into 140 characters.” And yet everyone takes these news clips as true. They’re like the scrolling bar on CNN: tiny newslets, but solidly imbedded in the social consciousness as being absolutely factual. This blog entry by delicious writer Meg Pickard ruminates on the same thing.
The social memes come and go, and they can bring us closer together or further apart. But the one thing they don’t do, despite our constant nattering away at each other and posting pictures of our bellybuttons, is foster communication. You aren’t spreading facts unless you check them yourself. And you aren’t contributing to a globally conscious situation unless you check the facts.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Twitter is a social phenomenon. Celebrities, businesses people, moms and dads, and anyone else you can think of is on Twitter. I think Twitter is good for good people connected with “like-minded” people (like attracts like). If you’re a traveler, you may be interested in connecting with other travelers to see what they have to say. You never know, you may be thinking about a trip to Africa and someone on Twitter may have some great information on places to stay and what to do. Grant it, there are some folks on Twitter who use it not to contribute anything positive. Just ignore them and connect with people who are aligned with you.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
There are enough sites around for me to connect with like-minded people, and they don’t limit me to 140 characters per interaction. And if I really need to know of a good restaurant in Warsaw I will try and ask a local before sending out a tweet asking the same thing.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
“And a big thank you to all Twitter users who turned their avatars green to “help” the Iranians! I bet that was super useful!”
You’re welcome. What did you do?
Seriously, though, I don’t understand this rant (and really don’t understand what it has to do with vagabonding). If you read Andrew Sullivan during the Iran protests (who was easily the highest-profile blogger covering events in Tehran), he was always careful to put the immense flow of words from Twitter in context. I don’t know anyone who took anything on Twitter to be “absolutely factual” – but unless you think there were hundreds/thousands of people faking their Twitter accounts, these were real impressions of real people on the ground. That has value. Did you also think the Neda video was worthless since it wasn’t fact-checked? Or did it perhaps occur to you that raw, un-checked data can help to raise awareness and oh, I don’t know, make people on the other side of the world care a little bit about faceless strangers fighting for their lives?
Would you prefer that everyone simply ignored the situation entirely, the way the “fact-based” MSM did until the Twitter/blogger-shaming got to be too much for them?
Sorry if I come across as harsh, but seriously. I was shocked to read this here on Vagablogging. Twitter’s an easy target for mockery, but I think belittling the effort to help the Iranian protests is just tasteless.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:09 am
Eva, What has changed in Iran thanks to Twitter? Do you seriously expect me to find a medium where a person writes a tweet about #IranElection and then about the great drinks they had a bar X later that night as having value? I didn’t need twitter to raise my awareness about the events in Iran. Even if there was factual information being disseminated on Twitter quicker than the mainstream media, what good did that do for you? Help you to turn your avatar green that much quicker?
I love the fact that Michael Jackson’s death outranks #IranElection on Twitter right now and has for days. Where’s all your support for the Iran Election protesters now? Where’s the support on Twitter for those opposed or for Zelaya’s return to Honduras? And do you really think some Iranian getting beat with a nightstick cared whether or not you changed your avatar to green? Sorry if I come across as harsh, but seriously Eva.
July 9th, 2009 at 10:53 am
“What has changed in Iran thanks to Twitter?”
Well, of course, nothing much seems to have changed in the end. But the protests – whatever value you might think they have, or not, for Iran in the long run – were fuelled by Twitter, for instance: There were the proxy servers set up by outside Twitter users to help Iranian protesters get their videos out, or the fact that a number of the protests were organized via Twitter. A big part of my objection to Claire’s post (and yours has the same flaw) is that it ignores the ways in which the Iranians were using Twitter throughout the protests. Sure, it’s easy to mock someone for turning their avatar green, but if Twitter’s so useless, why was it the medium of choice for so many of the protesters themselves? (Or, as I asked Claire, do you think all those Tehran accounts were faked?)
July 9th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Yes, I do believe some accounts and messages were faked by citizens of countries other than Iran, and by supporters of both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi within Iran. How did you find the correct information about the protests? By putting your complete trust in Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts? Just because information was coming out of Iran thanks to Twitter doesn’t mean it was the correct information.
Or what about the Prop 8 fiasco where the wrong information about the CA state Supreme Court’s opinion was posted on Twitter and was even picked up by major news outlets? Twitter makes it too easy for the wrong news to get disseminated quickly. And I have no faith in people to think that the majority of them will try to verify the information they receive. Most are lazy and willing to take 140 characters as fact. In my opinion, that reduces any value you perceive in Twitter.
July 9th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
“How did you find the correct information about the protests?”
How did you? Seriously, no snark. What source did you perceive to be valuable and reliable on the Iranian protests? Because, as you’ve pointed out with your Prop 8 example, the major news outlets apparently can’t be trusted, either. And it seems you’re no fan of Andrew Sullivan. So, what does that leave you?
July 10th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Eva, I don’t think the Tehran accounts were faked, although I know a lot of my Twitter friends changed their accounts to read “Tehran” in an effort to gum up the works. I also didn’t mention the usage of Twitter by Iranians because that wasn’t the point of the article: the point was simply that Twitter, as Scott said, allows for the dissemination of information about far away places quickly…too quickly for anyone to decide if it’s true or not.
Any good librarian checks a fact in three different sources before stating it as a fact. Twitter is a valuable resource, and I think the Iranians used it to “get their message out” for precisely the same reason that we should be very cautious in using Twitter as a news source: because it is easy. It’s self-publishing. You don’t need to know someone on a newspaper blog or a television production team; you can just go anywhere with an internet connection, and post.
I guess the question I’m asking is: is ANY information better than FACTUAL information? And what sort of impact will social-media-based mob rule have on future events? What if I got a bunch of my friends to say that someone blew up a mosque in Pittsburgh, PA, as a sort of flash mob, and then the news media (who, generically, often cull Twitter for “stories”) picked it up and there was backlash against local Jewish communities…because nobody bothered to fact check?
The world is a smaller and smaller place, especially with technology, but it’s still bigger than 140 characters. The sooner we realize that the things we do online, whether it be blogging, posting pictures on Flickr, searching on Google, or Twittering about something we don’t necessarily know anything about: we are having an impact on a much wider range of people than we did even five years ago. Social consciousness begins with disseminating truth.