The revolution will be Twittered
Americans consider Twitter an accessory to their already superfluous lifestyles. They live-tweet the Academy Awards. They tweet about their lunch. They tweet about other tweets. And media personalities have endlessly ragged on Twitter, calling it everything from useless to the end of society itself. It’s fair to say both claims are too extreme. Twitter won’t bring about the apocalypse, nor is it completely useless.
In fact, in some countries, twittering is downright revolutionary, and definitely dangerous. The Moscow protests last month were largely organized on Twitter. Youth created their own hashtag (that’s a combination of the hash # and the searchable tag word,) which helped them organize the sudden protest. Old people everywhere in Russia seemed very confused by the spontaneous organization skills of a bunch of damn kids with dexterous thumbs.
A more nefarious example of Twitter’s power can be found in Guatemala where Twitter user Jean Anleu was “raided by police, arrested, charged with inciting ‘financial panic,’ fined US $6500 (more than the average Guatemalan makes in a year), and sentenced to detention to be followed by house arrest.” Anleu is considered a threat because he requested his Twitter followers boycott the bank Banrural because of its alleged ties to the assassination of attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg.
It seems like when people aren’t twittering about Lost, Twitter can be quite the enemy of totalitarianism. And that’s a good thing.
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I wonder why twitter has accumulated such a cult following, meanwhile real-time chat clients like irc (used by geeks who are somewhat obsessed with security), have all but been forgotten (well, not exactly, but they certainly arent mainstream). I liked Glenn Greenwald’s comment about twitter, despite that it has been used for good. He said he was concerned that it would further truncate an already rapidly simplifying political climate, given that you are only allowed to post up to 140 characters.
Maybe Twitter just has a more pleasant aesthetic format, or perhaps it was a case of right time, right place that made it more popular than IRC clients.
I think Greenwald would be right if Twitter existed to replace traditional journalism. But that’s not its purpose, and even Greenwald admits that now. He said he sees a unique (if not limited) purpose for Twitter (brief updates, posting links, etc.) Personally, I’ve found Twitter helps hone my word economy. It leaves no room for superfluous adjectives.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] from Flickr user mousavi1388A month ago, I wrote a post about Twitter as a tool for social revolutions. At the time, I was referring to the [...]