Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Egypt. Show all posts
Thursday 12 April 2012
Research: A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News
Abstract
Twitter facilitates the spread of news and information enabling individuals to combat censorship and undermine the stranglehold of state-controlled media. It is undoubtedly playing a significant role in a rapidly evolving digital media landscape and 21st century politics. But journalists’ dubbing of the events in Moldova, Iran, Tunisia and Egypt as “Twitter revolutions” is perhaps more reflective of the experience of their own changing working practices than the politics on the ground. It points to a Twitter revolution occurring in the newsrooms of media organisations, evident in the increasing importance of Twitter for journalists covering breaking news stories.
The Paper
Available here to download from the Social Science Research Network.
Citation
Bennett, D., 'A Twitter Revolution in Breaking News' in Keeble, R. & J. Mair (eds.), Face the Future: Tools for the Modern Media Age, (Abramis, 2011), pp. 63-73.
Wednesday 14 December 2011
Five links from 2011: 'Twitter'
I am picking out a few of the more interesting links from my 2011 delicious bookmarks. On Monday, I selected five from my 'war reporting' tag.
Today, I've selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled 'Twitter' in my delicious account.
Enjoy!
August's riots in the UK prompted consideration of whether the use of Twitter and social media should be restricted.
As it turned out, BlackBerry Messenger appeared to be the communication tool of choice and recent research by the LSE/Guardian claims that Twitter was more useful in the aftermath to organise clean ups than to incite disorder.
Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence network around the revolution in Egypt.
In May, computer programmer Sohaib Athar provided Twitter updates of the US mission to kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Athar was unaware of the significance of what he was tweeting at the time but he knew something was up:
"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."
The Washington Post collected his tweets using Storify.
Meanwhile, Twitter's rapid uptake by all and sundry included the Taliban in May and Somali insurgent group Al Shabaab by December.
A rather surreal interactive war of words online now accompanies serious military activity on the ground as ISAFMedia and alemarahweb engage in disputes over Afghanistan while HSMPress take on Kenya's military spokesperson Major Emmanuel Chirchir.
"Potentially relevant tweets are fed into an intelligence pool then filtered for relevance and authenticity, and are never passed on without proper corroboration. However, without "boots on the ground" to guide commanders, officials admit that Twitter is now part of the overall "intelligence picture"."5. British Prime Minister considers curbing Twitter use after UK riots
August's riots in the UK prompted consideration of whether the use of Twitter and social media should be restricted.
As it turned out, BlackBerry Messenger appeared to be the communication tool of choice and recent research by the LSE/Guardian claims that Twitter was more useful in the aftermath to organise clean ups than to incite disorder.
Thursday 1 December 2011
Election Monitoring Crowd-Sourced in Egypt
From the New York Times' Lede blog:
"Although some prominent Internet activists decided to boycott Monday’s elections in Egypt to protest continued military rule, many well-known bloggers spent the day working as self-appointed election monitors. Using the same social media tools that helped them to force Hosni Mubarak from office, the bloggers posted images of long lines at polling places and passed on reports of apparent violations of the electoral code."
