#IranElection: Contrasting Views of The Twitter 'Revolution'

A lot has been made of web 2.0 journalism lately -here's the BBC's Richard Sambrook with the voice of reasoned experience. And here and here's commentary on the trending of CNN (and Mainstream Media in general) during the past week. Here's a few more items of note. We spent a lot of time on Twitter the past 72 hrs trying to determine our own take on events in Iran, and came to find the limitations of 'open source' reporting quickly overtook valid reports. The abundance of re-posted information, under the guise of individuals being 'the one who found this nugget' or that nugget of information was overwhelming. The beauty of Twitter is, it's all there. The post originating from ground zero doesn't need to be re-posted 100 or more times, yet that's exactly what happened. The mob psychosis familiar to anyone who's read Buford's "Among The Thugs" merely transmuted from the street to the internet. Everyone want's to be involved. Armchair revolutionaries excited at the prospect of cutting edge technology and a passion fueled by rapid-fire posts from the ground made the Twitter experience a personal one. It was like being able to tell a million of your best friends about the barroom brawl you weren't really a part of. Worse, there was little to no questioning of the validity of the Tweets streaming out - allegedly from Iran. Many very well were coming 'from the source', but how many were planted, faked, or otherwise provocatively placed to incite the fire? Not too many people stopped to ask. Or if they did, they quickly got caught up in what at it's peak amounted to over one thousand 'updates' per minute and went back to participating rabidly. At a certain point, there was no new information to tell. Concurrently, there was a lot of harsh criticism of CNN and Mainstream Media for NOT breaking in 'live' and reporting the story. CNN and the major networks have long ago shifted from being newswire style services to being programmed infotainment. The Iran election certainly isn't the first major international story that they've not covered well, or covered late. The fact that folks are upset at this lack of coverage is welcoming, but also a bit misguided. Meanwhile, the unfettered use of social networking and citizen-based 2.0 types of media as journalism is also welcomed, but requires a thoughtful approach to both reading/digesting the information and using the technology that provides it. What we've seen with #IranElection is more of a mobthink approach than a mindful one, at least thus far. We're very supportive and intrigued by the shift in news media from traditional sources to socially active ones, but a grain of salt is needed. There has been a rush to label The Twitter Revolution without properly analysis, and that run's counter to good journalism of any stripe. The use of Twitter and other 2.0 tech is causing paradigm shifts to old news and journo models, but at a cost. The floodgates are open and in order for these powerful tools to find a true value, they must be treated with respect and used wisely. We encourage clicking on all of the embedded links in this post and carrying on to click on their respective links. In case you can't be bothered, here's a relevant excerpt from Richard Sambrook's blog linked in the first paragraph which sums up the point we're making here. "If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all. But if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news." UPDATE: Cyber attacks - good or bad? More here. UPDATE: Twitter users change location info to help 'hide' opposition posters in Tehran. UPDATE: Things to do and not to do on Twitter.