Viva la Twitter!

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
- L. P. Hartley


Many moons ago, on LiveJournal, I emptied a bucket of bile (and possibly vitriol) over Twitter. I attacked it as a meaningless string of inanity, which had replaced the often insightful and interesting blog posts my friends used to produce. All this was rather undermined by the fact that I had never actually used Twitter, or dared step within 140 characters of it. In the tradition of techno-luddites and Republicans everywhere, I feared that which I did not understand.

Well now I'm a twitterer, for reasons far too complicated to explain (i.e. I've forgotten), and I thought it might be interesting to talk about one way in particular that my opinions have changed. Because while I remain convinced that Twitter comes in a poor second to longer forms as a medium for profundity and discussion of complex topics, there are indeed areas in which it excels.

Recent events rather prove the point - a quick look at the Trafigura super-injunction scandal shows that Twitter can do great things. In a way, this isn't new; with sufficient time and organisation, the populace have always had the ability to bring about change through sheer weight of public opinion. The Velvet Revolution, the Orange Revolution, The French Revolution... the tradition of public outcry in the face of injustice or oppression stretches back throughout the whole of human history, no doubt as far as the skins-clad cavemen who grew tired of the taste of half-cooked mammoth and dared to stand together to cry 'Ug!*

*"We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more!"

The key phrase in that paragraph, though, is 'with sufficient time and organisation'. The most effective revolutions arise spontaneously, without pre-meditation, in response to some defining incident of such magnitude or horror that otherwise quiet, unassuming people have no choice but to take action. Through word-of-mouth the news passes, swelling the ranks of the disaffected.

Before Twitter, before mobile phones and the internet, pamphlets and independently-minded newspapers were the revolutionary's weapons of choice. The spread of information was limited, slow, and organisation took time to build to a critical peak - time the object of public disapproval could use to scatter the embers, to crush opposition or discredit it. The sort of entities which tend to provoke outrage - governments, corporations, law firms - have the resources in place to defeat all but the most determined revolution, given the time to marshal them.

But the faster the news travels, the less time the establishment has to get organised. And in this age of immediate communication, Twitter is the ultimate means of collective action.

Watching news travel is like watching the spread of a particularly virulent disease; one person is infected, then their friends, then carriers from that group spread out to other cells of friends, carrying the message. The spread is exponential. And what Twitter does is take that one step further - there's no need for the news to be carried, or actively promoted in any way which requires actual effort. It's automatically thrust into the faces of everyone you know, not to mention a whole bunch of people you don't. And the minimal effort required on the part of the tweeter just makes it more likely that people will jump on the bandwagon; it doesn't cost them anything, in time or money or intellectual engagement. So why not?

There's another name for this: flash mob. In 1973 Larry Niven wrote a short story called 'Flash Crowd' where instantaneous, practically free teleportation technology results in a sort of large-scale version of the motorway jams and secondary accidents caused by ghouls slowing down to gawp at the scene of a crash. A minor riot is reported, and people from all across the world jump in to see in-person, then as the flash mob grows it gets further air time, and more people come in - not just to gawp, now, but to take advantage: to loot, to cause mayhem, to sell a cause.

The internet has its fair share of this, too. The Slashdot effect, where a website collapses under the weight of interest generated by a casual mention on a larger site. Hackers using denial-of-service attacks to cripple their target websites. And now, through the sheer size of his audience (close to a million followers and counting), Stephen Fry is a one-man DDOS attack.

He may try and deny it, but any time that many people listen to you, that's power. You have the ability to influence the way in which people perceive events, to create the first impression you want people to have. Maybe it's unintentional, but the effect is undeniable. You think the Trafigura affair would have been quite the same if Carter-Ruck had twittered first to nigh on a million followers?

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to take a closer look at the difference in reporting between Fox News and CNN, or the Guardian and the Daily Mail. At its extreme, you get William Randolph Hearst's infamous quote regarding the Spanish-American War: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

So what happens when someone not so well-intentioned as Stephen Fry, or even someone simply more politically minded, begins to wield that sort of power? Will we get that 'Fifth Estate' Fry speaks about in his blog? Or a new form of media, born from the ashes of the old?

Or will we get a revolution?