Yesterday I received an exasperated email from a friend of mine who wanted me to explain Twitter. Why are celebrities’ tweets so boring? Why do news media keep banging on about it? How could he possibly learn anything about Iran or Michael Jackson’s death? “Twitter is so …. Aaargh!’ he wrote.
Well I’m no expert on social networking, web technology, protest organisation, celebrity culture, international politics, well you get the idea – I’m not an expert on a lot of things. But I donned my best research hat and gave it a go. This was my attempt to make sense of Twitter:
Dear Correspondent,
I’m not surprised you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the amount of coverage Twitter is getting in the news and online. A quick search for “Twitter” at www.irishtimes.com returned 307 articles that referenced the micro-blogging website. A similar search on www.guardian.co.uk returned 2,367 articles, while a search on www.nytimes.com returned an unbelievable +10,000 articles. For any topic, that is a lot of content. So why are all these media types so interested in Twitter and what is it about their coverage of Twitter that has got you so “aaargh”? Well I tried to figure it out.
And where better to start than with celebrities. The fact that their tweets are less interesting than you expect them to be is, I’m afraid to say, all your own fault. Celebrities are real people, not the semi-mythical, ever stylish libertines of your imagination. Hence their tweets about their humdrum lives, cooped up in houses they can never leave for fear of being recognised will always seem dull to anyone who expects them to be constantly glamorous. Yet despite the mundane content of most celebrity tweets many people seem to find celebrities’ posts absolutely engrossing.
Take Stephen Fry, the British actor and writer, he’s a pretty popular guy and Twitter reflects that, 604,000 people ‘follow’ him. That’s about the entire population of Glasgow. You may think this is a lot, but you’d be surprised then if I told you that he doesn’t even make to the top 100 most followed list on www.twitterholic.com. According to Twitterholic Ashton Kutcher, the American actor and model, has just under a staggering 2.5 million ‘followers’. Forget Glasgow, that’s almost the entire population of Mongolia tuned in to Ashton Kutcher’s 140 character witticisms and pictures of Demi Moore.
From Twitterholic’s charts it’s safe to assume that following celebrities is a popular way to use Twitter. And if we also assume, quite safely I might add, that people like to know what celebrities are up to, understanding Twitter is pretty simple. In previous decades the redtops and glossy magazines, such as Hello and OK, attempted to satisfy people’s demands for celebrity gossip. Since the rise of the internet, mobile phones and digital image capturing technologies stalking celebrities has become much easier. As a result there’s a lot more content and celebrities have found their lives revealed in more detail than ever before. Public interest in them, however, has not abated, if anything these new technologies have just created a perfect storm of celebrity stalking.
In a world where their every move is scrutinised what’s a celebrity to do? Well using Twitter seems to make sense. Twitter allows celebrities to combine two of their favourite things, self promotion and information control, with the added benefit that it’s easy to use for everyone involved. Celebrities can update their fans, or more ominously ‘followers’, on every aspect of their lives. They can easily scoop newspapers, magazines and websites, if they’re fast enough, with apologies and explanations for gaffs they make by sending a simple text message. In a way, they can regain some sort of control over how people see them by having direct contact with the public.
Of course the other thing celebrities love to do is promote themselves and this brings us nicely into the realms of information dispersal. Celebrities like to keep their profiles high, Twitter lets them keep a stream of information coming that is easily and quickly digestible (the average tweet taking merely a few seconds to read). But it isn’t just celebrities who like to keep information coming and their profile high, companies and politicians like it too.
Eight commercial companies ranked on Twitterholic’s 100 most followed chart, including Google, Amazon, Whole Foods Market, Dell, Jet Blue Ariways, Women’s Wear Daily and Threadless. Similarly in the political arena Barack Obama, 10 Downing Street and the World Economic Forum all ranked on the chart. Even more impressive however was the prevalence of American news media with the New York Times, CNN, ABC, NPR, E! News and Good Morning America all ranking in the top 100. This side of the Atlantic the technology sections of the Guardian and the BBC ranked on the charts.
This is all fine you may say, people want to use Twitter to promote things and distribute information, what’s so strange about that? Well I’ll bet that when you were introduced to Twitter it was pitched to you as a social-networking site, a Facebook or Bebo that had nothing else apart from a status bar. To the sceptical it possibly seemed like social networking distilled to its very self-aggrandising and voyeuristic essence. Originally that was what Twitter did and was designed to do. However due to its simplicity, it has since come to be used in a very different way.
A recent report conducted by a team of business and tech grad students at Harvard revealed that people who used Twitter did so in a very different way to other social networking sites. They found that the average number of lifetime tweets per user is one and that half of users tweet less than once every 74 days. Furthermore they found that 90% of tweets are posted by a mere 10% of users. As the report suggests: “this implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.” Twitter is therefore becoming more and more a service that people sign up to to receive information, rather than use as a way to interact with others as you would on say Facebook.
So what is it about Twitter that got media types excited over the Iranian election protests?
Take this editorial from the Washington Times on the 16th June, four days after the election took place, as an example. It was titled “Iran’s Twitter revolution.” This article claimed that the mass protest, street demonstrations and rioting in Tehran by supporters of the Independent Reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi “were brought to the world in real time through social-media networks and online video.” It went on to claim that “as open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word” and that “well-developed Twitter lists showed a constant stream of situation updates and links to photos and videos, all of which painted a portrait of the developing turmoil.”
A similar “Twitter revolution” occurred in Moldova earlier this year when the ruling Communist party won the parliamentary election with just under 50% of the vote. Opposition supporters accused the government of electoral fraud and protests in Chişinău, the capital, descended into riots with claims of violent government crackdowns. All this was apparently aided and captured by a range of web and digital technologies. What’s important to understand in both these cases is that although international media outlets called them “Twitter revolutions” these news organisations were merely using Twitter as a buzz word to cover a range technologies. Due to Twitter’s prevalence in the news media’s echo chamber over the past year, it made a nice catchphrase. In reality the range of “social networks and online video” that they referred to was much more widespread than a single technology.
In addition to this catchphrasing, some critics have been sceptical of the extent to which these technologies were actually used in Iran and Moldova. Most reports now concede that most of the organizing in Iran occurred through far more mundane means: SMS text messages and word of mouth. Businessweek reported that when the Iranian government blocked the Twitter site “tech-savvy netizens” used “proxy addresses such as Tor or Proxy.org to bypass the government block of certain IP addresses.” This solution however was far too complicated for many users hence organising in more conventional ways, “over the phone and knocking on doors,” was the main method.
Furthermore the information available on Twitter itself about the protests has been called into question. How can anything be vouched for or validated? And how can it sorted through to find useful information? They are two questions that news organisations are constantly asking and also at times ignoring. In Iran’s case international news media were willing to take a lot of this digital content seriously due to the fact that their own reporters and correspondents were frequently banned from covering any kind of protest by the Iranian government. Since they couldn’t get the pictures and the stories themselves they relied on these raw channels as, probably not sources of information, but a least as leads for stories to follow up.
And that brings me to my final point. Twitter is becoming more and more commonly used as a way to distribute information alongside other internet media platforms such as YouTube to create interest in events and promote them. In Iran the real importance of the “Twitter revolution” was that it allowed a small tech savvy portion of the opposition to help focus international media attention on their cause. So although the romantic image of an Iranian protestor tweeting from the street to the world at large may not be real, at least Twitter is a little more useful than just broadcasting the thoughts of the bored and the famous.
