Sergio Abranches

If 2009 was the Year  of Twitter, it was also the year Twitter has become a solid journalistic tool to cover climate change, and a widely used resource for climate change advocacy and militancy, pro and con.

As Alfred Hermida observes (@Hermida)

there has been a rapid uptake of Twitter by journalists, provoking somewhat of a Twitter frenzy in some quarters of the media.

He also notes that

Twitter has been quickly adopted in newsrooms as a mechanism to distribute breaking news quickly and concisely or as a tool to solicit story ideas, sources and facts.

I saw that happen in the Media Center. Tweets were used to break news everyone knew would become updated in a matter of hours, if not minutes; to socialize sites and Twitter accounts that were good sources of info; to opine about events; to comment on the experience and ambience of COP15 coverage. It as like a TwitterBabel, a multi-language ongoing dialogue and information sharing experience.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy spread his own impressions, infos, and ideas through a Twitter account specifically setup for COP15: @ElyseeCop15. UK Prime minister Gordon Brown used the regular @10DowningStreet account to tell about his impressions. They both became very useful sources.

A typical tweet representing Sarkozy’s views would be

PR : “les difficultés de cette conférence, c’est la preuve d’un système onusien à bout de souffle”, about 13 hours ago from Seesmic. (“The difficulties of this Conference are proof that the UN system is exhausted”.)

A typical tweet reflecting Gordon Browns’s views would be

PM: Negotiations fraught, but determined to get this done. Leaders must put cards on table. 8:12 AM Dec 17th from web

When I look back at the hectic days in the Media Center, during COP15, one of the sharpest images I get is of thousands of journalists frantically looking for information, checking and verifying what they get by all means possible, a large number compelled to report real time.

The intermediation of Twitter turned this rather common situation, into one which best expresses the new emerging forms of what Hermida has called ambient journalism.

(A)mbient journalism – an awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information, serving diverse purposes. The system is always-on but also works on different levels of engagement in terms of awareness.

COP15 was the first COP in which Twitter was an integral part of media coverage. I guess it was also the height of blog climate journalism. I can’t show any evidence of that, but I can tell about my own experience: I got info from more blogs than online conventional news sites, except for Reuters and The Guardian. Sure, I’m counting blogs hosted by newspapers sites, such as @Revkin’s Dot Earth, or The Guardian’s Environment Blog .

Twitter was also a crucial resource for climate policy advocates, militants, and NGO’s. They served advocacy or militant purposes, but they were also good sources of information. I found Adopt a Negotiator’s use of blogging, facebooking and tweeting particularly interesting. It was probably educational to the participants, and was also a source for journos.

Twitter is today the single most important source for information about climate militants still detained by the Danish police.

And Twitter has become an unavoidable tool for research and journalism.

In fact, Twitter can be a serious aid in reporting. It can be a living, breathing tip sheet for facts, new sources and story ideas. It can provide instantaneous access to hard-to-reach newsmakers, given that there’s no PR person standing between a reporter and a tweet to a government official or corporate executive. It can also be a blunt instrument for crowdsourcing. (Paul Farhi – The Twitter Explosion, AJR)

Hashtags were widely used, but the dominant ones became #COP15, #Copenhagen, and #climate.

Hashtags are just one of the tools that bring coherence to what can seem like Twitter’s tower of Babel. (Paul Farhi – The Twitter Explosion, AJR)

The flow of tweets under #COP15 continues unabated and remains as a good source for journos, policy advocates and militants. The number of silly tweets has increased, it is true, but the meaningful and interesting outnumber the useless. My guess is that #COP15 will continue full of life and content until it transforms itself seamlessly into #COP16.

There are several interfaces between journalists, climate policy advocates and green militants. One of them is certainly Twitter. While policy advocates and militants can be sources for journalists, they are also among the most frequent visitors of news site and news blogs, looking for aggregate information and analytical opinion.

All of which means that Twitter attracts the sort of people that media people should love — those who are interested in, and engaged with, the news. (Paul Farhi – The Twitter Explosion, AJR)

Those who are still debating whether Twitter will replace blogs or other social networking resources, even some news sites, are missing the point. What we are looking at is a closer integration among them all. Each performing the function it is best suited to perform.

The change that made me see real value in Twitter came about a year ago, when the people I had learnt to know and appreciate from their writings in blogs started to have conversations on Twitter. At that time, I had been a frequent blogger for a couple of years and had been conversating with other bloggers via my own blog and via the comments on their blogs. Gradually I noticed that the conversations which previously were held on blogs and blog comments were moving to Twitter. So I started following the people whose blogs I subscribed to on Twitter. I hadn’t search for them before on Twitter, but now most of them exposed their Twitter name on their blogs. (Oscar Berg – “Why 2009 was the Year of Twitter”, The Content Economy)

For some purposes, Twitter works better than RSS Feeds. As blogger Oscar Berg says, blogs are personal, while Twitter is  collective platform, a sort of commons. Twitter, blogs, and social networking will be central to the continuation of the processes of aggregation, segmentation and specialization in the Websphere as well as in the media world.

Where no other resource still competes with Twitter is on what Cloud9Media has aptly called Realtime Magic. Be it real time search, or breaking real time news, or getting real time reactions or fulfilling any other real time info or social communication need one can imagine, Twitter works better and more economically than any other available tool.

Twitter is amazing as its the most efficient mechanism I have ever seen to allow me to peruse the thoughtstreams of others who live all over the world. (Vivek Wadhwa – “Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use”, TechCrunch)

Sergio Abranches

The audience has changed. It used to be a population of readers, mostly passive. Now it is a community of active information consumers, and they like it customized. Most read, aggregate, and add information on their own. Our world has changed.

This new treatment of the information one can get from multiple sources, through a multiplicity of media, even affects the frequency of comments on stories on blogs or journalistic sites. People will repeat, react, rephrase, review, remake on Twitter, Facebook or other social media, more frequently than on the comments window.

Maybe it is time we invert McLuhan’s phrase, “the media is the message.” Today, the message is shaping the media. The message is the media.

Think about Twitter: at the beginning it was nothing more than a different SMS. A 140 character media to convey rather simple, personal, or social messages. Users turned it into a powerful messaging device, a carrier of news and ideas. The ongoing conversation about the future of news is an outstanding example, but Twitter covers almost every possible area of interest with a mix of news, memes, opinion and research, all that in 140 characters plus the LINKS plus RT retwitting plus @reply.

This formula was concocted by active users exploring the possibilities and limits of the media, to spread the message. They invented RTs, and reinvented replies.The crucial difference that made this all possible? Twitter is open to experimentation, highly flexible within its boundaries. Your message is open to the public. You don’t address anyone in particular. Nobody has to ask permission to listen to you. Everybody can go to the public timeline and listen to what everyone else have to say.

If one likes what you’re saying, one will follow you. If one has something to say about it, one will @reply you. If one values what you’re saying, and wants to spread your saying, one will RT you. It’s all about actively shaping the media, and voluntary, free, social connectedness.

Journalism used to be an ecosystem made of writers and readers. This ecosystem is changing dramatically. Journalism is now embedded into a community where the definition of writers is being so enlarged to the point of becoming blurred. There are very few readers in it, meaning people who simply read and save their thoughts about the reading to themselves or a handful of friends. Even when someone shares ones thoughts only with a handful of friends, this sharing now often takes place online through social networking.

But this is less important than the fact one side of this ecosystem has totally changed. It has become a community connected through links set by purposeful preferences about information, knowledge, and entertainment. A community where role playing has radically changed.

Novel writers have become twitterers, and are sharing their own personal preferences, some of them very much revealing of their literary motivations. @GreatDismal (aka cyberwriter William Gibson) shows his attachment to Tokyo, his views on atemporality, gets intelligence for his new novel, reveals aesthetic preferences. @MargaretAtwood, talks about her travels, does social twittering, gets closer to her readers. In the Twittersphere they’re community members interacting at the same level of “social status” as their fans and readers. Some even have more followers than they do.

News writers talk about their angst about the future of news, do news criticism, get information, report the news, reply, RT. A journalist is no longer a solitary reporter, telling a story to a totally anonymous audience only to be reached through black and white printing. One is talking to a live public, who can reach back, react on real time, as fast as real time news reaches them. They can even Tweet an event, breaking news faster than the press. It has just happened again with the earthquake in Indonesia.

Roles are changing not because of the media, but because the audience, the Public, is changing. Besides, mainstream, professional journalists are no longer the only ones out there playing the role of news writing. This is a complication, because much of the information circulating in the Websphere is not properly verified. At the same time, however, “he says, she says” stories are plaguing the professional press, taking value and credibility from professional news writing.

Many are still caught by the wrong idea that the Websphere is about mega audiences. It is not. Unique visitors, page views, are all but numeric illusions. “Million uniques means little if the length of time visitors are on the site (aka, session time) is less than one minute without their returning back to visit. That’s like a million people driving by McDonald’s but never actually going into the restaurant,” says Patricia Handschiegel. “Page views”, she alerts, “can be (and very much are) gamed to create the appearance of more page views.”

So where those who understand that the audience is not in the traffic numbers should look for it? Her answer is “traffic does not mean there is an audience, at the end of the day, the audience is where the value is. Boasting giant page views and unique visitors means very little when those you are driving to the site are not sticking around, using it or returning.” They should generate value people are seeking when they’re browsing a newspaper or the blogosphere, or Twitter.

As Jay Rosen has argued, “in the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized — meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.”

The audience is now a community, a volatile community that can follow, unfollow, block, get and delete RSS feeds. It goes far beyond buying or not buying a paper, paying or not for content, old vs new media. Value-added news and information continue to exist and to produce them there are golden rules that can only be broken at the cost of credibility. Demand for news is increasing, not decreasing. This is the better time ever to be a writer on the road.

We may be just stepping into a new world, one that could be the most literary time possible, as Russian writer Dostoevsky once said about another era of change. He wrote: “We are so divided; we thirst for moral conviction and direction. . . We can even see that we still need to do a great deal along these lines and that much in this sense is still to be done. That is why I think that the present time is the most literary time possible.”

Twitter is no futile toy, nor a fad. You may find many uses for Twitter. It can be extraordinarily fun, and it can certainly be addictive. It may even have begun as a means for exchanging simple, routine messages.  But it has grown up as much more.

Professional political analysis and sociology are only beginning to grasp the weight and implications of social networking, especially after the arrival of Twitter. Twitter is on that account mostly uncharted territory.

There already are some interesting findings from Twitter analyses, though. Like Dan Zarrella’s comparative stats of tweets and retweets (RTs). He shows, for instance, that retweets carry more links (57%) than original tweets (19%); they tend to be more complex and less readable (as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid, and the SMOG readability grade levels) and, while more complex, thus requiring a higher level of education to understand, retweets tend to bring more novelty than original tweets.

Zarrella (@danzarrella) used the Regressive Imagery Dictionary, a coding scheme designed to measure the amount and type of three categories of content: “primordial (the unconscious way you think, like in dreams); conceptual (logical and rational thought); and emotional.” He found that RTs have more conceptual content, and “less primordial and emotional content than random Tweets.” He also shows that “social and instrumental (constructive words like build and create) behavior are ReTweetable, while abstract thought and sensation-based words are not.”

Zarrella has also performed a LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) analysis, to measure “various emotional, cognitive, and structural components present in individuals’ verbal and written speech samples.” It showed that “Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are more ReTweetable than Tweets about negative emotions, sensations, swear words and self-reference.”

Dannah Boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan, analyzed a sample of RTs and found that: 52% contain a URL; 18% contain a hashtag, 11% contain an encapsulated RT; 9% contain an @reply that refers to the person retweetting the post (“Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter”). Oops! The authors ask not to cite. So, please, don’t…

People retweet for many reasons, they argue, among them, to amplify or spread the word to new audiences; to comment on tweets; to act as a curator of new information; to make one’s presence as a listener visible; as an act of fellowship or homage; for self-gain; to store information for future use. It can be a messy conversation, the authors conclude, but it certainly is a meaningful one.

These findings contradict Pear Analytics’ recent study on Twitter, showing that 40.5% of the tweets studied are classifiable as “pointless babble”: the ‘I am eating a sandwich now’ tweets.”

Taken separately, out of the context of a full ongoing social conversation, saying gratuitously I am at Starbucks, at Wellington and York, in Toronto, having a cappuccino, does seem like pointless babbling. But, to my followers, with whom I’m engaged on a continuous conversation, it is information they can use. Some could be on the neighborhood of the address and ask if they could join for a face to face conversation. Or, knowing I am there would mean I’m out of office or far away from home, and that may mean I’ll be tweeting differently, or sparsely from my iPhone.

When I say that I’m going to give a lecture at the Economics Department of the University of São Paulo, at a specified date, would that be “pointless babble,” or “self-promotion” (6% on Pear Analytics figures)? Again, put it in the context of an ongoing conversation it is useful information. Followers might want, for instance, to seat on the lecture.

As this is an actual example, some really did. And it was very good to have a face to face conversation. Call it a physical verification of “virtual impressions.” Happy me, positive impressions were more than confirmed.

There is a clear mistake on the categorization and classification of tweets on this study. They found only 3.6% of “News” on tweets. But they only consider as ‘news’: “any sort of main stream news that you might find on your national news stations such as CNN, Fox or others.” Tech news or social media news that you might find on TechCrunch or Mashable are excluded from the category.

‘Tech news or social media news’, and all the news that flow on Twitter from independent journalists, mainstream journalists not ‘mainstreaming’, and bloggers are either “conversational tweets” or “pass-along value tweets” – 9% – (“any tweets with an ‘RT’ in it”).

“Conversational Tweets”, 37.5%, become a catch-all category: tweets that fit into more than one category, starting with ‘@’, and “tweets that go back and forth between folks, almost in an instant message fashion, as well as tweets that try to engage followers in conversation, such as questions or polls.” The fact is that every tweet is a conversational one, because twitter is a conversation.

Improper classification lead to misinterpretation of results. It seems that most of the 40.5% of “pointless babbles” are neither pointless, nor babble. They reveal their meaningfulness when adequately put in the context of Twitter as a conversation that emerges because you meet interesting people, sharing views, thoughts, experiences, information, about almost everything one could look for.

Dannah Boyd (@zephoria) remarked that “Twitter – like many emergent genres of social media – is structured around networks of people interacting with people they know or find interesting.  (…) It’s all about shared intimacy that is of no value to a third-party ear who doesn’t know the person babbling.”

Social relations are ongoing interactions with a memory. I know what I’ve talked about with my fellows out there. That’s why I do not need to recall past dialogues to keep talking.

Socially built meaning, that is, meaning that comes out of the social interactions within the Twitter community, does not come only through back and forth exchanges. There are many twitterers following several dialogues silently, and getting meaningful information from them, gaining knowledge, insight, tips for their intellectual, professional or personal lives.

Dannah Boyd helps to better understand this point when she shows what twitterers are doing online is “fundamentally a mix of social grooming and maintaining peripheral social awareness. They want to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable.”

Ok, but aren’t we making too much out of Twitter? What if it is a bubble? Won’t it wither away soon?

It does have a “bubble like” exponential growth. Twitter demographics are everything but precise, but, roughly speaking, twitterers were 4.4 million by the end of 2008, almost double that by February 2009, reaching 7 million; on August, some estimates say they are already 47 million. Staggering performance. Some argue that this is misleading, because many are inactive: at least 40% never twitted, or have any followers.

I’ve met some of these “silent” twitterers, and asked them why did they drop out. Most weren’t dropouts. They told me they were “listening”, trying to grasp the ways of Twitter. Some have started a selective following, after some time; some have already become active twitterers.

Twitter is not intuitive to everyone. It is nothing like Facebook, Orkut or other social networking. It’s different. To many it requires some learning.

A PEW study found that the use of Twitter is highly intertwined with the use of other social media: both blogging and social network use increase the likelihood that an individual also uses Twitter. Because it’s different, it adds new possibilities, and reinforces other social media.

It is unlikely that Twitter is a bubble about to burst. It can be replaced in the future by something that retains its functions, while adding new functionalities. But it can also adapt and evolve, as it has already done. Twitter today is a totally different species from when it came to life. It has dramatically changed its own nature, moved by the spontaneous innovation that resulted from millions of real time interactions.

I propose we start looking at Twitter as a diversified community. My own observation and active use tells me that there are at least three main types of twitterers:

Fellows – twitterers mainly interested on shared content. They are fellow discussants. Among them we can find leading fellows and engaged followers. Both are selective regarding their following, they tend to block unwanted followers (spammers, porn), and to unfollow those who prove inconvenient, ‘robotic’, or uninteresting.

Friends – real listeners, listening attentively to the rich intercourse of ideas taking place on Twitter; learning, preparing themselves to become active twitterers; eagerly jumping at every link that attracts their interest to benefit from the massive wealth of information that flows every second through Twitter.

“Following maximizers” – those interested on increasing their following, because they are looking for some gain or out of pure narcissism. They follow to be followed, and only listen to a tiny fraction of their following. There are also corporations, sellers and spammers, on this category, but they are even less engaged in the conversation than the “following maximizers”. As Danna Boyd says, they “are truly performing to broad audiences (e.g., ‘celebs’, corporations, news entities, and high-profile blogger types), are consciously crafting consumable content that doesn’t require actually having an intimate engagement with the person to appreciate.”

Twitter is no babble, nor bubble, you may call it a conversational community, with high viral potential (e.g. #FollowFriday), high political impact (e.g. #Iranelections), and high value as a means to convey ideas, and circulate the news. Most of the conversation going on would only be a “pointless babble” to those from Twitter’s outer space, as Dannah Boyd pointed out.

“Of course it looks alien. Walk into any typical social encounter between people you don’t know and it’s bound to look a wee bit alien, especially if those people are demographically different from you.”

That said, I’m about to twitter this post. See you there.