Twitter and news.

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Twitter is a social networking platform that has rapidly affected the way that people are able to communicate with one another and can simultaneously be seen as a news source. There is much more to the platform than just people following celebrities and waiting to see what they ate for breakfast or seeing what they decided to wear. It enables people through micro blogging, using 140 characters to voice their thoughts or ideas by sharing them on the web’s public sphere.




So how can Twitter actually be seen as a form of news you may ask?

Let’s looks at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, during this time citizens became cut off from mainstream media. It became their only option to turn to social media sites to try and gain some idea of what was going on. People were not happy with the way that their government was run, so protests developed via the social networking sites like Twitter.  Even though Twitter was not intended for political activism it seemed to have just developed in that area and has become crucial for activists. It is able to bring people together and allows them be heard by other people all over the world.

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The news source that Twitter enables is not your regular news source like say News Corp, that is arguably only producing news that aligns itself with specific agendas according to Rupert Murdoch.  Twitter allows messages from many, many different voices and from people who have no reason to be constrained by agendas or even by any type of advertising contracts. Unlike traditional news outlets it is also able to capture real human emotion and drama instantaneously. People cannot only record what they are witnessing but they can also add in their opinions.  This was an important aspect of the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 as bystanders were able to relay information to one other and they were effectively able to text everyone who wanted to know anything about the whereabouts of protests and keep people updated 24/7 about what was going on.

The hash tag feature of Twitter has allowed people to be able to search for information specific to a topic of interest. This is similar to the way we do a Google search in the way that the information is categorised according to the key words. For example during the Egyptian revolution the word #Egypt was used. It was such a topic of interest that it was found to be the top hash tag of 2011.

Howard Rhinegold’s Virtual Community paper that he wrote in 1987 has accurately identified the type of virtual community that Twitter has become. His words were ‘a virtual community is a group of people, who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks.’ This notion was written 25 years ago and it is amazing to see how it has become such an accurate representation of the online world that many people are a part of today.