The article, “A little birdie told me,” in the Toronto Star discusses the growing digital divide, by commenting on the two different types of interpretations available to the public during the G20 – that of the mainstream news and that of the citizen-driven social media superstar, Twitter.
While the news on television took a predictability negative position against the protestors, and relied on official sources from within the police force, twitter was the eyes and ears of the citizens.
Personally I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and lately I think this article can be applied to the revolutions happening in Egypt and Libya. While this was going on, I had first started up my Twitter account, and of course these topics became a major concern of mine. I didn’t follow journalists from CNN or CBS or FOX or CBC or wherever, I was following citizens on the ground involved in the protests, tweeting first hand what they were seeing and doing and thinking.
While this was happening, a tsunami hit Japan and caused catastrophic loss of life and damage. Predictably, almost all coverage of the peoples’ revolutions in the Middle East was cut in favor of the shock and awe of natural disaster coverage that Western media knows generates eyeballs. The same principles of coverage that had mainstream media covering property damage and the minority group of disruptive miscreants that infiltrated the protesters’ circles at the G20 summit.
Herein lays the power of Twitter. On Twitter, I read a message that came up under the hashtag #AJforum – The Al Jazeera Forum – discussing Twitter’s role in these tumultuous times. “Twitter is like putting an f1 engine in a revolution, it allows information to reach a critical mass in record time.” The real-time nature of twitter is its greatest strength, and can help organize and move people just as much as it can help people monitor a particularly public situation.
THE WHISKEY DIARY 