Twitter has come into its own in the last few days as a channel of dissent underneath the radar which acts as an organisational stream beyond instant messaging, weblogs, social networking sites and texts. Another splendid example that the medium is secondary to the objective, once a certain level of critical mass and user knowledge allows a network effect to develop. The channel of mediation will have some structural effects, such as 140 characters or less in the case of Twitter. This could actully be an advantage in the organisations of flashmobs and smartmobs as users probably develop private codes to effectively speed the transmission of knowledge.
Twitter first caught the headlines in regard to crazy states last month when somebody decided to impersonate the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea. They were not amused:
In a twitter conversation with Forbes, the author of the KCNA twitter
feed admitted that he or she was a writer and Web master for the
German-language parody site Stupidedia, based in Austria. "KCNA has
unintentionally funny articles, and I thought it would be funny if an
antiquated regime like North Korea had a Twitter account," wrote the
faux-Communist, who didn't respond to requests for his or her name. The
fake KCNA account, which has gained more than 1,000 followers, was set
up using the Twitterfeed RSS service to automatically syndicate every
newsflash from the real DPRK news agency.
From a baseline of satire, Twitter became the channel of choice for the protestors in Iran. Twitter delayed downtime to aid their protests. The short nature of the medium and the bludgeoning barriers of the Iranian firewalls allowed news and help to speed out of the country via short bursts like twenty first century Morse Code:
The Iranian government may have blocked or shut down various
communication mediums - like phone lines, the Facebook social network,
YouTube videos and even text messaging - but people are still sending
photos and information from Iran in short 140-character bursts...
Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat, and Caroline Dangson, an analyst with IDC, both said the use of Twitter to broadcast reports from the scene of such incidents shows how individuals have taken control of news dissemination.
"Social media is empowering the masses to connect, share and organize in ways of incredible scale and speed that are much harder, if not impossible, to control," said Dangson. "The situation in Iran is illustrating this phenomenon where government and media outlets are no longer the gatekeepers to news. The man on the street is now the reporter in the field covering the situation in Iran thanks to the penetration of connected devices and availability of social messaging applications."
And in the metropole, this contributes to an asymmetry of information between those following events and those still chasing their own tales in print or on broadcast. As news agendas shorten, we have a new information elite.
