Tweeting the Revolution…Roger Waters needs a re-write
I’m a relative newcomer to the Twitstream. Usually a rapid adopter of new technologies, I’m not sure why it took me so long to get my head around the value of Tweets. I half-heartedly opened an account a few months back, but it has only been in the last week or two that I’ve become a more committed Tweeter.
Now that I’m part of the TsuTweetie (my word – feel free to spread it) I’m intrigued at how rapidly it has gained momentum, in much the same way Google and Facebook did in their early years. Determined not to miss the boat, the purveyors of Old Media are rushing to embrace it. Sky has a fully fledged “Twitter Correspondent” in the form of Ruth Barnett (bizarrely pictured here in front of, um, YouTube. Hey Social Media all looks the same, doesn’t it?)
Anyway seeing how the Twitstream has been the lifeline for those protesting the election results in Iran has been amazing. It has been a rallying cry for protesters, an indispensible tool for organising and for telling the world what is happening on the ground. Even British actor Stephen Fry has become a Twit-tivist, Tweeting lists of proxies that haven’t been shut down by the government so people in Iran can continue reaching out to the world. So important has it become that the US State Department apparantly contacted Twitter asking them to delay scheduled system maintenance so that Iranians could continue to have access.
It calls to mind a song written by Roger Waters about 17 years ago, called “Watching TV”. In it he writes of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and presents a (presumably fictional but emblematic) figure of a single protester who dies on TV. His point it that the world had changed, and his “yellow rose in her bloodstained clothes” is different from other historical figures because the massacre played itself out on television.
“And she is different from Cro-Magnon man
She’s different from Anne Boleyn
She is different from the Rosenbergs
And from the unknown Jew
She is different from the unknown Nicaraguan
Half superstar half victim
She’s a victor star conceptually new
And she is different from the Dodo
And from the Kankanbono
She is different from the Aztec
And from the Cherokee
She’s everybody’s sister
She’s symbolic of our failure
She’s the one in fifty million
Who can help us to be free
Because she died on T.V.”
At the time he was right. In the past it was left to radio to penetrate the public consciousness and, of course, in the hands of a master radio can be a hugely compelling medium. And then, in the hands of the TV conglomerates, the media could begin throwing resources at the big stories and bring them to life with powerful pictures. But now, in the hands of the masses, the world of social media – Twitter, YouTube, Facebook – is even more powerful because all the barriers to entry are gone. You don’t need a broadcast studio, you don’t need a licence, borders don’t matter. All that matters is raw truth and strong content. And honesty.
The reason Twitter works is because it is brutally honest and power lies in the hands of the people. How trite that sounds, but how true it is. The big media companies are no longer setting the agenda, rather you and I are now deciding what is important and old media is being forced to follow, or render themselves irrelevant.
So while the news agenda has shifted, traditional media still has some advantages, and that rests in their access to the kind of resources that most bloggers can only dream of. And when the media display a willingness to spend those resources on the right things, the result is usually way superior to what you find in the blogosphere – certainly when it comes to deep analysis and well-researched, fact-checked stories and commentary. Also the power brokers haven’t figured out how to manage the shift to 140-character-news agendas, and a country’s President is still more likely to sit down for an in-depth interview with the BBC, CNN, New York Times or Mail & Guardian than with Joe Blogger or Josephine Tweeter. That kind of access is unmatchable and while President Obama might pay lip service to Twitter, he’s only Tweeted about 20 times since his inauguration (@BarackObama). Scrolling through his stream it’s disappointing to see that he has missed the point a bit, using the wrong tone and using it to promote the wrong things rather than putting a touch of humanity, gut reaction and personal viewpoints in it. But then he is the President of the United States with an army of people surrounding him employed specifically to carefully craft Brand Obama. So he’s not going to Tweet himself, is he (“@joebiden your fly is undone and the cameras are rolling”).
So I think Roger Waters needs to sit down and do a re-write of his classic. From Tiananmen Square to Tehran. From Watching TV to Tweeting for Real. Let the Revolution continue.
