Revolutionary Twits Redux
Here’s another thing to throw into the mix. Part of my thoughts (parts of my thought?) was generated by a post by Ethan Zuckerman entitled Watching Madagascar, via Twitter. He starts off strong:
The nature of breaking news is changing… The (confusing, apparent, partial, incomplete) coup in Madagascar is the first event I’ve been able to watch only through social media.
But a few paragraphs later, the big reveal:
So I’m doing what my Malagasy friends across the net are doing – religiously watching the #Madagascar tag on Twitter. That means I’m primarily reading Thierry Ratsizehena, a marketing and social media expert in Antananarivo, who is listening closely to news via television and radio, and sharing what he knows with his Twitter readers. Lova, who’s in the US, is translating his tweets into English and adding context and commentary.
I don’t doubt that these two were working as an “effective news bureau” for Ethan and other interested observers, and this is clearly a useful service in the Twitter manner, but I couldn’t help but notice something that Ethan had slipped in there. Thierry Ratsizehena was “listening closely to news via television and radio” and then sending that on to Twitter. While Ethan may have been literally watching events through social media, he was getting all his news from television and radio. Ethan’s not making any claims for Twitter but in this instance I’m not sure Twitter is doing much more than ham radio would?
I don’t want to harp on about Twitter, really I don’t; it’s pretty much irrelevant to any of the work that I’m likely to be doing in the near future1. The reason I find the coverage of Twitter interesting (rather than finding Twitter itself interesting) is that in some senses it’s clearly a fad (in the same way as most technology journalism is fad-based) and in some senses it clearly represents a shift in the foundations – although I don’t think that it is that shift, which is what the breathless news coverage tries to suggest.
Perhaps it’s as simple as this. As our traditional media dies off (as per Clay Shirky’s recent article), people are looking for something to take its place. In this case, Twitter looks like journalism – they’re broadcasting reports from on (or near) the spot! – but it isn’t journalism, and it doesn’t possess the powers of organisation that people seem to think it should at first sight. We want it to be journalism because we want something to take journalism’s place – or in Ethan’s case, fill the gaps that his traditional media leaves in his coverage of the world. In countries where traditional media retains its position – particularly radio, which shows little sign of dying out in developing countries – journalism is alive and well, and in fact provides the raw material on which Twitter users draw.
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- I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it won’t be relevant to any of the humanitarian work that I’ll do in the future at all. [↩]
I agree with your general point – much of the news reported on twitter and blogs is derivative of mainstream media. In this case, my point was slightly different – during the struggle for power in Antananarivo, government and anti-government forces controlled different radio and television stations. It required quite a bit of journalistic work to watch and listen to the news and intepret the movements of the various factions, which our Malagasy friends were doing. They were then using Twitter to get messages to the Madagascar editor of Global Voices, who posted detailed reports. So while I accept the larger point, this isn’t the best example… more a reflection on something I wasn’t suficiently clear about in my post.
EthanZ
8 Apr 09 at 20:10
Without journalism, people would have nothing to “Tweet” about.
Matt
8 Apr 09 at 23:54
I think journalism is the raw material that blogs draw upon, too. Neither twittering nor blogging is journalism in any true sense – at least not often.
And I agree with you; twitter is not much of a tool for humanitarian crises. It’s unreliable, it’s public, and it’s chaotic, among other things.
Alanna
9 Apr 09 at 5:06
Ethan – thanks for the clarification. This raises the question “what is journalism?” since listening to the radio and television is not – generally speaking – considered the bedrock of journalistic work. If a professional journalist relied on that for their reporting, we would rightly excoriate them – and one of the trends that has undermined journalism in the last decade has been exactly that. The most visible example is some of the reporting from Iraq that never stepped outside the Green Zone; but also the type of “churnalism” reported in Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News. This descent of journalism makes it easier for people to pick up on (for example) Twitter reporting and say “hey, here’s something that looks like journalism!”
In the humanitarian context, what worries me about about this trend is that we already have enough problems reporting on humanitarian issues. This is partly due to insecure environments, but also due to lazy journalism (there are few journalists with a solid understanding of the humanitarian sector, despite its size and “importance”). The current trend is going to take us further away from decent coverage of these issues, and that worries me.
Paul Currion
9 Apr 09 at 6:12
[...] those of us following the situation from off the island clung to Twitter for current information – though much of the information we got was from broadcasts on radio or television within the country, that information wasn’t available outside Madagascar, and Twitter made it possible to get [...]
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[...] those of us following the situation from off the island clung to Twitter for current information – though much of the information we got was from broadcasts on radio or television within the country, that information wasn’t available outside Madagascar, and Twitter made it possible to get [...]
Green Design » Blog Archive » Unpacking “The Twitter Revolution” In Moldova
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[...] Twitter by Malagasy friends to report events on the ground in a blogpost a few weeks back, and got gentle but firm pushback from Paul Currion at humanitarian.info, who noted that most of these posts were Twitter users reposting reporting they’d heard on [...]
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23 Apr 09 at 15:27