Deconstructing the Twitter Revolution

As the cataclysmic events unfold in the streets of Tehran, a whole meta-conversation is taking place about the role of Twitter in helping to spark, and sustain, the revolutionary fervor unfurling in Iran. The use of Twitter to get news about the protests to the outside world, and to help organize the protests (not to mention help keep protesters from getting shot) has led many of us to reconsider our pre-formed opinions about the micro-blogging service.

To put it in more personal terms, when people are dying in the streets of Tehran, it’s way too dismissive to say, as I did in an earlier blog, “Twitter is a way for over-connected, over-caffeinated Web junkies to convince themselves that their moment-by-moment doings are significant.”

The doings of the Tehran protesters are obviously quite significant, and so I need to adjust my views. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger at The Atlantic, wrote, “I have to say my skepticism about this new medium has now disappeared.”

My skepticism hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been leavened by genuine admiration. Twitter obviously has some very powerful use cases – but as a standalone business model, and as a tool that’s “Changing the Way We Live” (as a presciently timed but overly exuberant Time cover story put it), it’s still overhyped.

For one thing, as Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum observes in a questioning post about “the Twitter revolution,” there remain serious questions about who’s doing the tweeting from Tehran and how reliable those accounts really are. “There was just too much of [the tweet barrage from Iran]; it was nearly impossible to know who to trust; and the overwhelming surge of intensely local and intensely personal views made it far too easy to get caught up in events and see things happening that just weren't there.”

That said, Twitter is more than ever being headlined as a game-changer for the rest of us. I don’t buy it. To better examine my own prejudice, I read closely the Time story, partly because it was written by Steven Johnson, a writer whose work I admire.

For an example of Twitter’s power as a society-altering technology, Johnson described “a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform.” Called Hacking Education, the event was attended by “entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists.” And, naturally, during the conference they tweeted incessantly, creating what Johnson called “a shadow conversation” that both echoed and amplified what was going on in the room.

That’s well and good, as far as it goes. But please note that, first, these conference attendees were a self-selected bunch: of course the entrepreneurs and VCs were Twitter-users. That’s a pretty limited sample set from which to argue that something is “changing the way we live.”

Second, the difference between a conference in Manhattan and a riot in Tehran, in social media terms, is slight: Both are real-time events that, by their nature, are off-limits to most people. You can’t get into Tehran right now; you couldn’t get into the conference unless you were an invitee. Providing a “shadow conversation,” or a real-time live feed, from such events is, clearly, Twitter’s most powerful use scenario. “Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement,” Johnson wrote, and that goes even more so for the Iranian uprising, as the mullahs are finding out to their regret.

Johnson goes on to make some other, less plausible, claims: Twitter’s “ambient awareness” function, i.e., letting you know what your friends and followers are up to at any moment, is more useful and productive than you might think; Twitter could replace Google Inc. (GOOG) as a search tool for certain topics and events; and one of Twitter’s primary functions is as a distributor of pointers and links to more substantive content, like magazine articles, research reports, and the like.

The last is undoubtedly true, but so what? There’s nothing inherent about Twitter that makes it more useful or seminal as a source of fruitful links and associations. I’d just as soon get that information via e-mail, which is far more persistent, searchable, and organizable.

As for Twitter as a search tool, here’s what Johnson writes: “If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.”

Okay, fair enough: and that’s why I’ll keep using Google. In my work, and my life, I’m constantly seeking out authoritative sources of information, whether it’s on the Lakers, the history of dissent in Iran, or the future of social media. If I want to know what’s really going on in Tehran, I’ll read The Economist. If I want to know what my “extended social network” has to blurt out about Kobe, I’ll go watch the Finals in a sports bar, thank you very much.

Similar criteria apply to knowing what my brother-in-law had for breakfast. a) I don’t care, and b) I don’t suffer from the illusion he cares what I had for breakfast either. Twitter’s “ambient awareness” is the reason we have houses with brick walls rather than glass. Whenever I see someone tweeting (or IMing) constantly, I think of Sartre’s immortal observation: “Hell is other people.”

Again, don’t get me wrong: The events of this week have proven that micro-blogging has a future, and likely a powerful one, in providing outsiders with real-time information on unfolding events they cannot witness themselves. Whether it’s a shareholder meeting, a tech conference, or a revolution, that’s a very powerful function. But note that most people reading tweets out of Iran have accessed them via blogs – in aggregated and filtered form, in other words. Twitter, as a technology, is obviously here to stay – but it’s much more likely to persist as an application embedded into other communication tools (like, say, Google’s Wave) than it is as a standalone service – far less a standalone business.

So, call me convinced. But please don’t tell me that Twitter is going to change the world – or that I’m somehow obligated to start using it.