The revolution will not be televised. It will, in fact, be tweeted.
That phrase or some variation of it has been sent from mobile phone to mobile phone in 140-character packages. “Tweets” are messages sent out by users of Twitter, a service that allows anyone with a cell phone or computer to send updates to friends and subscribe to receive updates from other accounts. The Web-based application has blossomed in recent months to join the likes of Facebook and YouTube as one of the latest sociotechnological innovations connecting users around the country and the globe.
The media has increasingly looked to these types of popular Internet applications for news — especially television, which has a twenty-four hour news cycle that requires a constant stream of fresh content. Such practices draw in viewers by creating a more interactive, user-content-driven model of journalism, like last year’s presidential YouTube debate.
Whereas in the past, cable news programming consisted of a few “talking heads” debating the issues, today’s inclusion of the viewer via Facebook, Twitter, etc. has broken the monopoly on who’s opinion really matters.
Twitter has been receiving increased publicity as of late because of its role in the recent political unrest in Iran. Following accusations of election fraud in last month’s presidential election, thousands of Iranians took to the streets in protest only to be violently suppressed by state’s police. Additionally, the Iranian government sought to censor international journalists from covering the demonstrations.
When traditional news outlets were shut down, the media turned to an unlikely new tool: Twitter. Real-time updates from protesting Iranians soon became headline stories as reports of protesters clashing with riot police were carried by the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. Grainy cell phone cameras captured the ongoing street battles, and the pictures eventually made their way to traditional media outlets via Internet uploads.
Tales of political unrest and violent attacks on civilians all made for compelling news, the type cable news networks thrive on to attract viewers. The addition of Twitter and other communication tools adds a new element to broadcast media that more traditional forms of media often lacked.
Many of the initial reports coming out of Tehran were first-hand accounts of protests and subsequent government opposition that carried with them the emotional immediacy of the reporter. That emotion was conveyed to readers and viewers in the days after the protests broke out, when bloggers around the world took up the cause of their Iranian counterparts. That raw footage conveyed a more powerful image to viewers than the objective reporting of a traditional journalist.
While text messages and tweets don’t carry the weight of law or the physical impact of weapons, the past week’s events highlight their institution-shattering potential. If anything, these events have reiterated the power of the Internet as an entity that eclipses the controls of any government (and perhaps vindicates the Chinese government’s fear of the web and its uncensored content).
Twitter may also indicate the next logical step in the evolution of journalism. Last January, when a US Airways flight was forced to crash-land in the Hudson River, the much documented event was not first reported by the AP wire or a local camera crew but by ordinary citizens using Twitter.
The first report — “I just watched a plane crash into the hudson riv in manhattan” — was sent just minutes after the actual crash, and the first image of the downed plane, taken by an iPhone, was uploaded long before TV news networks first aired reports of the incident.
As every camcorder phone becomes a news camera crew, the news inches closer to real-time reporting, whether it breaks in Tehran or New York City. Imagine a world in which any information — the weather in Chicago, the score of a ball game in Miami, the status of an election in San Jose — was available in real-time entirely through the updates of ordinary Americans like you.
The idea seems farfetched, but given the events of the past six months, not entirely unfeasible.
Player is a plan II junior
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