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 Journalism in the Twitter EraPosted on Jun 24, 2009From time to time, a message pops into my e-mail announcing that someone is “Following You On Twitter.” In fact, I don’t go anywhere on Twitter, having signed up just to get squatter’s rights to my own name. I have enough trouble limiting my thoughts to 750 words, let alone 140 characters. Twittering is just frittering. Or so I thought before Iran. I am not going to call this the Twitter Revolution. That’s far too cute a handle for the dramatic and dangerous uprising. It was not tweets that brought Iranians into the street to protest a rigged election. “Tools don’t drive revolutions,” says even a Netizen like John Palfrey, co-author of “Born Digital.” “Revolutions happen and people use any tools they have.” As for power, there’s a cartoon showing a protester holding his cell phone up to a mullah beating a protester and warning, “Stop or I’ll Tweet.” If this is a Twitter Revolution, the score so far is Despots 1, Twitter 0. As Palfrey says, “Bullets are more powerful than bytes.” And yet, this has been an extraordinary moment for the new media, a coming-out party of sorts. If the searing image of Vietnam was the AP photo of a girl stripped naked by napalm, if the image of Tiananmen Square was a young man facing down tanks, well, the iconic image of Iran is a cell phone video of Neda Agha Soltan dying on the streets of Tehran. And this time the message was in the momentum. The mournful video was passed from a cell phone in Tehran to an e-mail address in Europe, then to Facebook and YouTube and finally CNN. All in a matter of hours. Advertisement This storm began just as the Iranian government was closing down on foreign and domestic journalists, expelling some, arresting others. Banned from the streets, some reported from their bureaus against a photo backdrop of the city. Meanwhile in Washington, comedian John Hodgman told diners at the Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner, “At this very moment, the fate of Iran is strangely entwined with the sleep schedules of the geeks who maintain the servers at Twitter and YouTube.” But stranger still was how many of these “correspondents” were sitting in their offices, trying to sift hailstones. Indeed for all the excitement about the raw material flowing and snaking across borders one step ahead of censors, there is also a propaganda war between government and protesters being waged on the same digital platforms. Who is a thug and who is a hero? Who is a protester and who is Basij? Some have as much credibility as Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial. The fog of war has become the downpour of texts and tweets. Some see in this media moment the creation of a new hybrid model of journalism, where professionals work with raw reports and analysts decode tweets. Even The New York Times has now posted a request for “readers in Iran to help us document the post-election unrest.” But in this time of unrest you will forgive me for some skepticism. How many more foreign bureaus were shut down by accountants at the home office than by censors in Iran? I don’t have to remind readers of newspaper woes, but in this imploding world, who will do the job of the mainstream media? The Not-Quite-Twitter Revolution shows all the virtues and vices of the Internet. The ease and flow of information. The difficulty of knowing its accuracy and meaning. It’s like searching for medical advice in an online world of quacks and cures. If there’s anything we have learned, it’s that the need for guides—and dare I say trusted guides—is greater than ever. So here is the new world of You and YouTube, of Tweets and Tricks. Stories fly, voices can’t be silenced. But how will we know what to believe? Forgive my bias, but old-fashioned journalism—validated, vetted, edited—is as central to our portrait of the world as it was in the predigital past. When the streets of Tehran are quiet as they are today, the most dramatic moments are not tweets and texts. They are when protesters go to the rooftops at precisely 10 p.m. to chant—God is Great! Death to the Dictator!—in equally old-fashioned voices. Ellen Goodman’s e-mail address is ellengoodman1(at)me.com. © 2009, Washington Post Writers Group Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment
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America Performs Its Familiar Role of Propping Up a Dictator
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By ardee, June 29 at 5:54 pm #
Gee, nefesh do you burn books as well?
I wonder what you find so threatening that you dare not link to it? Do you not understand that you condemn yourself with those ill chosen words of yours? If you actually read the link you might simply waste a few moments, or you might even find ammunition for your cause among them, but no, too threatened by words I guess.
I ,for one, find Mr. Smoliar a good read, whether or not I agree with his conclusions. Oh, and the link nebesh posted is broken, heres the right one:
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2009/06/but-how-will-we-know-what-to-believe.html
Report thisBy nefesh, June 29 at 9:40 am #
S P A M
This guy does hit-and-run spam jobs all the time…I guarantee Smoliar I will never click on his link and I will gladly tell others not to as well.
Report thisBy samosamo, June 26 at 12:39 am #
By jihadinator, June 25 at 6:24 pm
““what i’m trying to get at is, no one person or handful of people should have the ability to decide the truth that is published.”“
***************************************************
It did take the second paragraph for you to lose me and besides, it takes the person who is curious enough to start looking for any media that would represent a true and accurate piece of work on what would have their curiosity so peaked.
Then is it not too hard to check that information with what the curious person has witnessed or knows from experience.
Biggest example of this is watching news reports or ‘cool’ videos from demolition companies to grab an obvious idea of what a building(s) looks like when it is demolished by explosives; turn around and watch a video of just the world trade center building 7 ‘collapsing’ and you will get the picture and objectively understand that NO plane or NO flames brought down wtc 7, it was set for implosive demolition and that is how it came down that afternoon.
Have you read Greg Palast’s ‘Armed Madhouse’? If not, don’t worry, this work doesn’t dwell on the 9/11 attack.
I do expect to find people with enough inside knowledge, sources and resources to put very accurate information that is still available in book form and here are a couple of so authors for you to check out(it will require that you read maybe more that what you read now:
Chalmers Johnson - his ‘Blowback’ trilogy.
Report thisGreg Palast - mentioned above.
Naomi Klein - very good works and very well researched.
Andrew Bacevich - ‘The Limits to Power’.
William Black - ‘The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One’
And for climate change:
Richard Alley’s ‘The Two Mile Time Machine’ about as good as it gets in trying to understand climate change.
By jihadinator, June 25 at 6:24 pm #
(Unregistered commenter)
the best thing that could possibly happen to journalism is for the new york times, fox news, cnn, etc… to die. When you say “...validated, vetted, edited—is as central to our portrait of the world as it was in the predigital past.” you strike directly at the issue. The mantle of creating our ‘portrait of the world’ is a heavy one, and who is capable of ethically bearing that responsibility? Those currently charged with this crucial task have kow towed to parent companies and lawsuits and the behest of the corporatocracy, but becuase they have the respect of most americans as institutionalized, reputable sources, americans will trust their word more than that of the most investigative journalists.
what i’m trying to get at is, no one person or handful of people should have the ability to decide the truth that is published. the internet is the first forum for truly democratic news and information, but it requires effort on the part of the user to disemble fact from propaganda and hype. citizens of a ‘democracy’ should not expect to have the truth handed to them.
Report thisBy samosamo, June 25 at 4:21 pm #
Nothing will beat the old way of investigative journalism, all this new technology of ‘everyone reporting the news’ is poppycock of too many voices or faces talking at the same time about every different version of what everyone saw and just try to cut your way through that to find reality.
Even as the msm controllers try to get a stonger hold on the information they allow to be passed on to the veggies in this country, it is still encouraging that there are web sites, some magazines and true investigative authors of books that can and do get to the bottom of an event or situation even if it takes a year to so to research the whole and that information is most likely the best and most accurate.(but unfortunately, that means if the veggies want to be informed they will have to learn to read and comprehend)
Charles Lewis of old ‘60 Minutes’ fame on CBS said it best when he quit that conservative controlled waste land when he decided not to be told WHAT to investigate and HOW LONG(or short) to investigate something; he would pick what he wanted to investigate and take as long as it took to report the reality of a subject or situation and to do so he went out on his own and created ‘The Center For Public Integrity’ which still operates today.
And ““By boggs, June 25 at 1:28 am”” is absolutely correct in the fact that until the people get control of the MSM by breaking up that ‘good ole white boy country club ownship’ of the monopolies that very well ILL INFORM the citizens of this country, this country will NEVER get out from under the yoke that is holding us down.
Books are for me the best no matter how discouraging and depressing the information may be, it will at the least be very enlightening.
Report thisBy Timberry, June 25 at 3:07 pm #
Excellent piece, thanks; I’m not sure I agree with all of it but it’s certainly addressing the issues very well. I love the last paragraph!
Report thisBy Stephen Smoliar, June 25 at 12:46 pm #
As I reflected on this piece, I realized that it was an excellent follow-up to one Goodman wrote a little more that two years ago (i.e. before Twitter):
http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2009/06/but-how-will-we-know-what-to-believe.html
Report thisBy ardee, June 25 at 7:54 am #
I applaud Ms. Goodman’s excellent and somewhat poignant article above.
Someone once said that ‘the revolution will not be televised’, likewise it wont be ‘twittered’ either. Revolutions are rather personal events and, if not confined to the people , are easily corrupted.
Report thisBy boggs, June 25 at 1:28 am #
I’m surprised that CNN could recogognize news when they see it.
Report thisThey didn’t recognize news when we let the Supreme Court select our president in 2000. We had two very corrupt elections in 2000 and 2004 and CNN did not recognize that as news. CNN did not show the protesters who got bloodied up with rubber bullets. But I expect CNN got the president they wanted?
I am telling you people that until you have your cords pulled from the big media propaganda machines, capitalists will continue to walk away with your money.