Institute For The Future

Fieldnotes from the Iran twitterstream

Perhaps you've been like me, glued to the twitterstreams about Iran over the past days.  It's been compelling watching, a new kind of media experience delivered not only in tweet-sized bits but in the knitting together of multiple media forms and sources.  As Clay Shirky points out in his articulate way in an interview posted the Tedblog yesterday, we're seeing the media invent itself in real time.

I'm not going to write here about the Iranian street itself: check iran.twazzup.com for excellent streaming coverage. Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish at the Atlantic online is also doing a nice ongoing aggregation that's a step up from tweetstreams. Rather, I want to share a few fieldnotes from a my view as a participant observer, with extra insights from the brilliant architectural anthropologist who tweets under the name Bahiyyih Maroon.  

What’s it like?  The experience of being immersed in the mediastream is: intense, almost addictive, emotional, visceral, tactile, like a game of “virtual hot potato” because links come in and you choose them and click them and move around in between them, and maybe you pass them on.  It’s about becoming part of the flow.   You scan short titles in tweets that move dynamically down your page in something like iran.twazzup.com, or Tweetgrid, find things that reach out to you some way in the space of a quarter-second, move in fits and starts between content in multiple formats, from a set of photos to a blog post to a mainstream news article to a mainstream television clip to a Youtube video to any other format you could possibly imagine.  And then you curate them in your own way, tailor them to your different networks, juxtapose things that only make sense to you, and for some people, send them out via email or twitter or Facebook or SMS or a phone call.  

What are people doing with Twitter?  People in Iran are using Twitter for their own purposes, to organize, to warn, to protest, to proclaim.  But the bulk of Twitter people are NOT Iranians.  What are they doing?

Supporting an ongoing political action.  The largest portion of what

happens in the stream.  This begins with the one-to-one public

communications between real people such as “I happen to be in the US

& just one of millions of ppl worldwide that are trying to do a

small part to help the freedom fighters,” and also includes all the

retweets of on-the-ground information, the links that educate others

via pointers to specific content, and the general expressions of

support for the Iranian people such as “@Mirriaam stay strong. Keep the

faith. Stay positive. Keep hope - it is very powerful. Remember we are

all supporting you guys!.”  It also includes specific actions that you

can literally watch as they emerge.  There all kinds of digital actions

such as broadcasting the IP addresses of servers that Iranians can

access, contacting Twitter to ask them to stop their scheduled

maintenance, “Change your Twitter Location to Tehran and your TimeZone to GMT+3.5. Help shield #IranElection and confuse Iranian censors.#SEO”; changing your avatar or webpage wallpaper to green to express support, or “RT : Tor information being spread within Iran. Set up tor following instructions at torir.org #iranelection”.   There are also calls for actions outside of Iran that could be more than digital: "@jstrevino & @ChuckDeVore let me know how I can help. Call or email me. HUGE Iranian population in CA. Since Obama won't lead, maybe CA can". 

These actions then often become tempered and tweaked through community self-monitoring and self-organization.

Self-organizing and self-monitoring the Twitter community.  This

is closely related to activism and also represents a huge portion of what

you see in the stream.  You can track the emergence of new ideas for

activism and then see the community tweaking and balancing the effects

of those actions.  For starters, it quickly became apparent that the community needed a single digital identifier on Twitter. Too many people were passing on information that was tagged with

different words (or "hashtags").  This meant that the information was

streaming into different buckets depending on what word you searched

for.  The result was a Cory Doctorow Boing Boing post called "Cyberwar guide for Iran elections," and tweets like this one: “RT @StopAhmadi Plz use #IranElection & #gr88 - if it changes, I or other trusted tweeters will announce”.  Two additional important instances of self-organizing and self-monitoring are:    1) disciplining the information flow based on the emergent political situation on the ground.  For instance, the two most visible instructions in the stream in the last few days, repeatedly endlessly in different ways, have been to stop tweeting proxy addresses (“RT if u have functional portal\proxy which has not been twtted - pls do NOT tweet it - will tell u what to do with this later #Iranelection”) and to stop using the real names of Iranians on the ground when retweeting their information.  Both were quickly disseminated and achieved excellent results. [Update: nice post by Virtual Lee on Learning the Twitter Rules of Engagement.  Includes a series of tweets from @persianwiki, an Iranian tweeter who has become prominent in the stream, which shows @persianwiki having a real time conversation with the Twitter community about information discipline.] 2) dealing with misinformation. One of the biggest challenges, and currently being met with warnings to not trust “new tweeters” from Iran—which would mean literally checking the tweeting history of every single tweeter who seemed to be writing from Iran. Perhaps we will eventually see pointers to specific locations putting out “bad” information (in this case, seen as government or pro-Ahmadinajad

sources).

Update: Just saw this posted in comments on Mashable post Mindblowing election stats: Twitspam's Fake Iran election Tweeters names a bunch of Twitter accounts that have been confirmed or "unsorted" and helps you block them.  

Promoting themselves!  Never underestimate a marketer: “How I Made $600 a week with New Google Wave Gwave.notlong.com iphone Tehran Tweet Deck iphone” and one of my favorites, “#IranElection trend? so sad that STEVE JOB's has died.. so sad earned $2 ,612 thanks to this to this”

Continuing their ongoing insider conversations with their everyday networks:  “RT) Sorry all that are getting text alerts! I'm getting invovled in #IranElection as much as I can on Twitter!” lets people know why they are all of a sudden feeling and seeing the effects of this tweeter’s sudden urge to join the flow and pass on information; “so what did I missed in Iran while I slept? #IranElection” is a note among friends, hardly meant for the eyes of people parsing the stream for Iran-related information, but there nonetheless.

I have to stop!  This is becoming as addictive as the stream itself!  

Two biggest issues: how to handle the speed of the stream, which will only get faster as more people join, but which already is about as fast as I can handle personally; and how to assess accuracy/credibility of information.