The Twitterization of News Analysis: Egyptian Revolution Episode

Twitter, the new George Washington

It always drives me crazy when I hear people spout some version of, "If you don't know your past, you won't know your future," by way of accidentally depreciating the importance of understanding the wider world in order to navel gaze. We know us quite well thank you. But we don't know what some farmer in Ireland who took a gander on some property in the city during the boom is thinking, or whether the people of Iceland are learning to trust their elected officials and banking sector again after the collapse of the past few years.

A broadening of horizons is in order, as the scope of many Americans is quite limited to a redundant version of this, that, and the other.

All the news coming out of Egypt is the perfect moment to realize the narrow scope of our our usual thought patterns, and this link via EastSouthWestNorth, one of my favorite blogs, has a neat little discussion (from Mother Jones online) about the merits of glorifying technology at the expense of understanding deeper reasons for change in countries like Tunisia and Egypt.

An excerpt:

In April 2009, Evgeny Morozov wrote a blog post about antigovernment protesters' use of social networking tools in Moldova, wondering if the country was in the midst of a "Twitter revolution." The demonstrations soon dropped from the headlines, but a meme was born: When Iranians took to the streets—and the tweets—a few months later, Western pundits and journalists declared a "Twitter revolution"; Andrew Sullivan announced, "The Revolution Will Be Twittered." The phrase has since been applied to events from Guatemala to Uganda. Most recently, it's been used to describe the protests in Tunisia that led to the flight of its autocratic president.

Yet Morozov has become intensely skeptical of the concept he helped introduce.

(Mother Jones)

The tendency to reduce everything to the simplistic or irrelevant was not lost on us while watching CNN's coverage on Egypt over the weekend. The anchors must have said the word "Twitter" a bazillion times over, lacking any definitive turn in events to report. They could have spent the hours familiarizing the ignorant and blissful (me, you, us) about the intricate possibilities that might rise from the fall of Hosni Mubarek.

Our thoughts lead us to conclude that much of this sudden activity is the work of more than a few intelligence agency efforts by the U.S. and others, combined with long planned internal efforts by the peoples in these nations. To focus on Twitter somehow seems almost demeaning to the efforts of others.