A little birdie told me…
by alejandro on 12 Apr 2009 | Comments
There seems to be a growing trend for citizen journalism afoot in the blogosphere, and Twitter could be the avant garde for this movement. Over the past several years, people have begun to turn to their mobile phones for more and more information. Mobile phones have become one of the most common items people carry in the world along with their keys and wallets. This is an amazing statistic considering it spans across the globe and across economic divides. From CEO’s of large corporations to nomadic Bedouin’s, the mobile phone has made itself the tool that can bridge the gap in universal communication.
One of the most exciting movements that mobile phones have brought about has to do with anyone being able to report news on the ground first-hand. With a simple text that is restricted to 140 characters, people have been reporting on such crises as the Mumbai terror attacks or the US Airways Hudson river plane crash. Another trend in this movement is people using Twitter to organize and rally crowds for political protests. This has been very recently applied in Moldova and was so successful that the government suspended cell phone and internet service temporarily to stop all of the information that was getting out about the political turmoil from the protesters.
Where this leaves us of course is with a lot of questions. Can this type of journalism become a new norm? What are the potential drawbacks including the vetting of information? Where do we go from here?
Some of the years recent Twitter chatter:
Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter
NYTimes 4.7.09:
A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police.
The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.
Twittering the USAirways Plane Crash
WSJ Blogs 1.15.09:
Janis Krums, a guy with a camera and a penchant for social media tools, posted one of the first and most remarkable photos today of US Airways Flight 1549 after it crash-landed in the Hudson River.
“There’s a plane in the Hudson,” the Sarasota native wrote on the microblogging site Twitter just as reports began to break of the plane hitting the water off Manhattan’s west side. “I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”
SF Activists Use Twitter to Coordinate War Protest
MarketingVOX 3.21.08:
To mark the fifth anniversary of the US occupation of Iraq, anti-war protesters in San Francisco used the micro-blogging service Twitter to coordinate their movements throughout the day.
The Direct Action to Stop the War group is using Twitter to text participating mobile phones when volunteers are needed for events at strategic locations around the city, according to Wired.
Organizers typically use walkie-talkies and a bullhorn to coordinate protesters, but those carrying radios are usually the first to be arrested by the police.
