I admit it; this time last year I was one of the Twitter nay-sayers.  I had an account with a picture, I had ‘Tweeted’ and followed people’s accounts that popped up.  It seemed simple enough to me, and quite frankly a bit dumb.  I’d given it a shot – and I didn’t get it.  I passed the same meme to others that I had absorbed myself, and dismissed Twitter as an over-hyped soapbox where people document what they had for breakfast.

This has been, for many, the default judgment of the social network based around 140 characters and second in line to Facebook’s throne. In hindsight this is a verdict solely of those who don’t understand Twitter or how to use it.  A recent report by Wildfire found that even many Technology and Media company heads who have jumped aboard the Twitter bandwagon with a business profile haven’t actually grasped its potential for real interaction and engagement.  A recent Business Insider article held the headline ‘Media Tycoons Say they Understand Twitter But Have No Time For It-Then Reveal They Don’t Understand It’ which sums it up rather well.

Like a Trending Topic on the site itself Twitter snobbery can at-times seem like fashionably current viewpoint, in fact its ignorantly outdated.   Just look at the events of the past year.  You won’t have to look far for headlines in which Twitter featured, played a part in or out-scooped.  Twitter in 2011 has not only made the news but helped create the events that have instigated radical social shifts and major, global headlines.  As the Business Insider wrote recently Twitter has become “a revolutionary new interactive media platform and media distribution system, an interactive ‘cable company’ for the digital age.”

However the misconception that Twitter is solely for talking at people rather than conversing and sharing still persists.   Twitter can indeed be a one-way conversation in the ‘asymmetric model of sharing’ -a bit like an RSS feed.  It is, of course, very popular in this way as favoured platform for public figures who use the service to relate to fans and publicise various aspects of their work or life without having to personally connect to every follower in the way the Facebook is structured.  The list of public figures from popstars, high fashion designers, politicians, philosophers, campaigners, writers, film stars and media figures is veritable who’s who of the world and has proved a new source for information on those who regularly feature in the news, for the first time direct from their keyboards (unless, like some, they are managed by their PR team, which for some overly verbal stars could have saved some scandal.)  It’s a new, more direct way of those in powerful positions coming into contact with the, well, 99% of the population.  Just imagine Martin Luther King, Marylin Monroe or Jimi Hendrix’s Twitter accounts…the mind boggles.

Conversely Twitter is also an extremely efficient platform for multi-way communication to various and open amounts of people and groups.  This is by employing simple tactics while Tweeting.  Twitter, basically, has its own coded, practical language: @ signs and # hashtags perform important links between topics, people, events, organizations and trends and acts like a channel or stream to direct posts to audiences, regardless of whether you follow each other.  Once embraced, those hashtags and @s started to illuminate a social network that is not only as informative as the news and email but actually better.  If news is to be new, it cannot get fresher than from the mouths of those making it.  From the person on the street to the person on your screen.

It is a duality between Twitter’s ability to act as a one way feed as well as a communication tool between exponential amounts of parties that makes it such an effective social and news tool and the one way model is not to be dismissed either;

As Mark Suster points out Twitter’s asymmetrical model means users have a new form of online identity, distinctive to email or Facebook identity (although Google+ is doing this now and Facebook has followed suit) by being m0re of a multi-layered business card or channel rather than a personal space or address.  In response to those who say that Twitter is just inane noise, I now respond; ‘just click unfollow’.  Less etiquette-riddled than the Facebook version to ‘unfriend’ Twitter is what you make it and who you allow to populate your feed.  Breakfast history posts need never feature, and be warned I’m ruthless on this rule.

Twitter’s Year

For me it was the summer of 2011’s London riots where suddenly a new perspective on how incredible Twitter actually was as an information-sharing platform dawned on me.  While sitting in the Vexed offices news from Twitter about how and where the riots were spreading, and the subsequent #riotscleanup that followed provided my first experience of how Twitter surpasses news in speed of delivery and relevance and numbers of sources.  From Wikileaks, the Arab Spring, Bin Laden’s death, the UK Riots, the Occupy movement, Press ‘super-injunctions’, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and the Royal Wedding have all been scooped by Twitter or had Twitter playing some part in the story.   For example in Marches front page news story the Japanese earthquake and tsunami this year Twitter became a replacement communication service when phone lines went down, and on the other side was one of the most tweeted-per-second topic of the year.

The adbusters co-founder and person credited with building up the #Occupy movement into a global phenomenon praised the simple power of a Twitter hashtags saying: “[Occupy] started off when the Twitter feed started going crazy with that hashtag”, saying that social media played a crucial part in taking the movement worldwide and mobilizing the idea into mass actions.  In freedom of information stories such as phone hacking, Wikileaks and injunctions the power to share information in such an effective way is effecting power structures all the way to the top of politics, bringing fear into regimes and governments across the globe.  In the case of the #injuction one footballer took to keep an affair a secret the gagging order didn’t cover Twitter’s mouth as people gleefully and freely passed the truth that the press couldn’t utter at a dizzying rate of tweets per second.  Twitter’s ability this year to out-news the news has seen it at the apicentre again and again of debates about freedom of information.  Its no coincidence it is one prominent tool that activists such as WikiLeaks and hacking groups such as Anonymous use readily.  John Naughton wrote in The Observer this  month; ‘I had a fascinating conversation with a State Department official who […] told an instructive story about how a senior colleague was baffled when a demonstrator appeared in Tahrir Square holding up a placard that contained only a Twitter hashtag. “What’s that?” asked the baffled diplomat.’ Indeed.

Twitter’s power, like most social networks, is that it is a cross section of society from highbrow journalists to people on the streets who would be news sources, but instead now have a direct platform themselves – with the power to pass information widely, at speed and with clever marketing tactics.  So although Twitter is named after a rather unimportant chirping and chatter its important to note that its power comes, like the uprisings it is enabling, in numbers and the power of information and freedom of sharing.  A single bird’s tweet, if you like, sounds deafening when millions of birds are chirping, a powerful motif for a new-era of power of the masses.  With 100+ million active users and over 250+ million tweets per day Twitter, used to its full potential, passes information more efficiently and directly between locations, sources, groups and topics around the world like ever before.  Suddenly the outdated notion of Twitter as just silliness seems rather facile.

Looking forwards, Twitters future lies largely in the freedom to share information remaining untouched by the governments it challenges.  For now, however, you’ll find me browsing Twitter for my daily fix of news, as well as interacting with people from across the world about topics as serious as freedom of speech to #bestchristmassong.  We all know power is knowledge, only now it comes in at under 140 characters.

by Elle Holgate

Links / Sources:

We Have Only Scratched The Surface of The True Value of Twitter, Both Sides of The Table, Mark Shuster

2011: A Year In News-Breaking Tweets, Kate Bussman, A Twitter Year, Stylist

http://www.businessinsider.com/media-tycoons-have-no-time-for-twitter-2011-12

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-self-serve-platform-launches/37263/

http://wallblog.co.uk/2011/12/05/the-top-hashtags-and-topics-of-2011-charlie-sheen-egypt-mcdonalds-and-apple/

http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/tps.html

http://mashable.com/2011/12/06/tweets-per-second-2011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

http://mashable.com/2011/10/27/occupy-wall-street-adbusters/

http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/tps.html