After Tehran, can Twitter be a flash in the pan?
At our conference last week I asked how many people there thought Twitter was a flash in the pan. A third of the delegates put up their hands.
As I tried to keep up with the main Twitter feeds on Iran last night (go to twitter.com and search for #iranelection), I wondered how many hands would go up now.
I looked at a page of tweets, and after a few seconds a note appeared at the top: ’35 more results since you started searching’. I left for a couple of minutes and it was 270. This was a flood pouring onto my screen.
It’s not just Twitter. Facebook and YouTube are busy too. A Facebook page called I (heart) Iran is buzzing with posts and links. Many are to YouTube, where videos of the protests taken with mobile cameras are gathered on this page.
But Twitter is the big one – it was not jammed by the government, unlike other sites, which could be why it took off. Or it could be that short comments are the equivalent of people signing a petition, or even marching – the content does not matter, the numbers do.
There was a petition set up last night to stop Twitter doing its nightly maintenance – nightly US time, that is. ‘The people of Iran have been economically, politically and culturally silenced,’ it said. ‘Twitter is their only voice’. It worked, so that the maintenance will now be done later today – during the night in Iran.
All quite thrilling or, if you like, terrifying. But what does it tell us about the nature and future of Twitter?
First, the publicity must be good for anyone who makes their living from the internet. I have been watching how it has been used to cover dramatic events since 1997, and wrote up what I found in my FT column. The war in Sierra Leone was an early one, then there was 9/11, the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, several conflicts in the Middle East, and so on.
Fascinating for me, but it was a lonely business. I could see the potential and wrote about it, but I also knew it wasn’t a mass thing; the internet wasn’t going to change anything. Usually, my job was to report how under-exploited it was.
It’s all changed now. This piece is not about how the internet is being used in general in Iran, because that it is a mainstream story elsewhere, for example on the BBC. But bizarrely, the main issue for web people in large organisations is still, often, to get their bosses and colleagues to take the internet seriously. Publicity like this is their best friend.
Second, Twitter is playing to its strengths in Iran. It is a many-to-many broadcasting system, and it is different from other media. A mass email shot is many-to-many, but you have to get the addresses first: here people can tune in. Maybe CB radio is the nearest thing. But this is on a much larger scale than anything truckers could dream off.
Here thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people are broadcasting. No-one could read all the tweets in the #iranelection stream. I was fishing randomly in the flood, and found many posts linked to videos, some giving instructions on how to get round Iran’s censors by using ‘proxies’, others messages of support or pleas for help.
The point, as I said, lies in the sheer numbers. The Tehran government may be able to ignore Twitter, but the US and other governments cannot. I said there was a web petition to keep Twitter going last night, but it wasn’t really necessary – a ‘hashtag’ (search filter) called ‘nomaintenance’ was set up and turned Twitter itself into a giant petition. Beautifully simple.
Third. And that is also a flaw with Twitter – its volume. Iran is a very special situation. Because it is the numbers not the content that matters, the unmanageable number of posts is not an issue. But it is for most of us living our less dramatic lives. I follow Twitterers who I think will tell me useful or interesting things – I choose them because I know they have knowledge and contacts I value. I pick up useful things sometimes– so why have I ‘unfollowed’ (good grief, what are we doing to our language?) most of them? Because they insist on telling me about their private lives, about utterly trivial things, and I just can’t find the wheat among the chaff.
I know that some guidelines on Twitter says you should mix in private posts, to somehow make you seem more human (?). Please don’t – have a separate private stream if you wish, but let me share your professional wisdom, not the detail of your breakfast. And even then keep the volumes down: I can’t and won’t read someone who is sending out a tweet every few minutes; it’s an invasion, like junk mail, and I will turn it off even though it means I will miss the odd gold-encrusted nugget.
I know that it is possible to filter posts by keyword or hashtags. Fine. But I read columnists because they tell me about things I don’t know about; and usually I don’t know I don’t know about them, so any filter would deny the point. What a sterile mind I would have if I read only about subjects I had chosen. Don’t make me.
Fourth, Twitter‘s other great strength is its speed and spontaneity. It takes only a few moments to tap in a Twitter message – brilliant for spreading a thought, a link, a plea. Watching posts pouring in at intervals of a few seconds last night, I wondered what other medium could match it.
Fifth, and that is the other problem. As Andrew Gowers, former FT Editor, said at our conference, “The web is a vast edifice of comment built on a narrow foundation of fact… a damaging view in one country can easily become received opinion worldwide”. How many tweets put out last night, and repeated over and again, were just plain wrong? Maybe someone will get a PhD one day by analysing them; meanwhile the risks to organisations at the wrong end of such rumours are obvious.
So where are we? Iran shows that Twitter is incredibly powerful when it is playing to its strengths. But its strengths here are to do with quantity not quality. They may be relevant to corporations or organisations – but only negatively, when they are the targets of mass protest.
Twitter should also be a useful device for picking up ideas, links, whatever from people whose views we value. But only if those people stop mixing them with their cornflakes.
Is it a flash in the pan? Much less likely than it was a week ago. But unless tweeters learn to cut the blather, many of us will tune Twitter out of our day-to-day lives. We can always tune back in when another drama pours onto our screens.
Posted on June 16, 2009 10:31 by David | 0 comments
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