gatewatching

I’ve been invited to speak at Media 140 in Sydney tomorrow. It’s now sold out so I can’t encourage readers to come along, though the ABC will be streaming it. This is an international event, which is focussed on exploring

the disruptive nature of ‘real-time’ social media looking at tools such as Twitter, live-blogging, facebook and other social networking tools as they rapidly transform the media in real-time.

I’ve been invited by way of the good people at newmatilda.com, where I occasionally pass comment on such topics.

Each speaker gets five minutes, and below the fold I’ve reproduced the text of something like what I’ll say tomorrow. Actually, this is more like what I would say I had the chance - there’s another couple of hundred words that need to come out of there by my calculations.

Comments and feedback most welcome - I was asked to speak on the Iranian elections and social media, and I’ve tried to address myself to what I saw as an overemphasis in some assessments on the specific role of Twitter in those events.

For those who are going - I’ll see you there.

Today I’m here to talk about Twitter and it’s relationship with ongoing events in Iran, though I think the catalyst for this part of Media 140 was the prominence of Twitter around the the time of the Iranian elections earlier this year. It’s a complicated thing to address in a few minutes: here goes. In my few minutes, I’ll suggest that the events in Iran revealed a lot about Twitter’s affordances and constraints as a platform; that Twitter was part of a range of communications platforms and strategies that were important; and that we need to be careful about the way in which we think about this platform. I bring a few different perspectives to this discussion - my doctoral training was in media history, I’ve worked as a practitioner on online e-democracy and citizen journalism projects, and I was asked as someone who comments publicly on media, new media and politics in New Matilda. I’m an avid Twitter user, but I should say that I should say is that I’ll try to be an analyst rather than an evangelist, not least because I feel like media companies are capable of doing the latter job for themselves.

Twitter’s affordances first: it was amazing to watch, at the time, how people, here in Australia and elsewhere, were mobilised using this technology to talk about, and emotionally invest in, political events in a faraway country. It was extraordinary to read in real time, on a public feed, commentary from people who were inside the country, and directly involved in these events. It would be churlish to doubt that there was a genuine expression of empathy for Iranian protesters on the part of many in, for example, the greening of avatars, and in their willingness to spread scarce information from within Iran as widely as possible using twitter. Some examples of mainstream media coverage of the event - and famously CNN’s - appeared feeble beside what was happening in real-time on my feed. But what was seldom mentioned was how great it was to be able to get real-time, expert commentary from experienced journalists and Iran-watchers like the ABC’s own Mark Colvin. There was a brief, shining moment where it seemed that Twitter helped people to establish a different kind of relationship with major geopolitical events than is allowed by broadcast media. It also seemed qualitatively different from my own prior experiences of produser-driven, web-based platforms, and the best way I can describe for the moment is this is that it seemed more intense - perhaps because of its real-time, communal aspects.

Nevertheless, the claims some people made for Twitter, especially in the heat of the moment, were too bold. Crediting twitter alone with driving events in Iran risked writing out, just for a start, the long history of the Iranian/Farsi political blogosphere. This is extensive and diverse, and is the venue for, among other things, complex political debate that belies the somewhat simplistic, black hats and white hats version of events that some seemed willing to accept on Twitter. If any one web-based technology has political consciousness-raising in Iran in recent years, if any mere communications platform can be connected with the brave decision of so many to put their bodies on the line in the streets, it’s the blogs. We know how large Iran’s largely blog-based online public sphere is, and how crucial it has been in preserving a space for dissent and debate in the face of a state that doesn’t tend to encourage such things. Iranian people weren’t waiting around for Twitter as a focus for their dissent.

Further, a lot of the protest organising that was done via social networks was accomplished, in a straightforward one-to-many, broadcast fashion, using announcements from Facebook groups associated with candidates. One wonders why this wasn’t mentioned more, and how much this has to do with the media hype cycle that picks up one technology at a time. Within Iran, where the government moved quickly to limit and monitor Internet use, word of mouth played a role in organising protest. The point is that when we get too excited about the newest platform, we fail to recognise that most political action is interwoven with a whole ecology of information and communication practices. Twitter gave us a new way to track events, but we weren’t confronting the Iranian state.

There was some overemphasis on Twitter here was also too little said regarding what these events revealed about Twitter’s limitations as a tool of political protest and communication. One thing to focus on briefly is how the value-neutrality and accessibility of a tool like Twitter is a two-way street, as is the absence of gatekeepers. If information is highly spreadable, so too are simple errors and deliberate falsehoods. It’s much easier to retweet something than it is to check whether its true. It’s very difficult to ensure over time that people communicating from inside a country in turmoil are who they say they are. Life and death situations throw all of this into some relief. I’ve previously advocated the position that digital literacy for social networks needs to encompass some of the attitude to sources and facts that the ideal version of journalistic practice embodies, but that’s a longer conversation.

The rhetoric surrounding twitter at the moment is very familiar to media historians, and resembles what’s greeted the emergence of every medium throughout industrial modernity. That’s not to underestimate Twitter’s usefulness, it’s just to say that this revolution has been announced before. There are some fallacies of futurology that recur when new media arrive. New media are always seen as superseding their predecessors, but very few media technologies disappear from use in any simple way. they persist alongside emerging ones, because they still have applications. New media are always seen as more transparent - and that is less mediating than their predecessors - but when we settle down we usually realise that no medium is a pure avenue of information; each one is used to select and frame events in specific ways. New media are often seen as democratising, but what do we mean by that exactly, beyond a normative endorsement. In fact, they tend to gather unique publics, and there’s enough research about social networks now to suggest that they have specific audience, and are capable of exclusion as well as inclusion. The last thing to say about Iran, then, is that although that election may have been stolen, Ahmedinijad has a constituency, disproportionately they are rural and poor, and altogether they’re the last people who are likely to fish up on twitter, and thus the last we would have heard from during conflict around the election. We here today are a specific group marked by specific privileges, and the Twitter user-base is not as inclusive as we might like to think. We need to be reflexive about the nature of its networks when we think about this platform as a source of information.

journalism abc, media140, Sydney, Twitter