Most of us in the conference room were white, 20-somethings. Most of us had the latest laptop propped open on our legs or table with 20 different websites open, clicking, typing, and procrastinating. Dare I say it, most of us were probably only half listening to the\u00a0 Oxford-style debate going on in the conference room.<\/p>\n
We the interns of\u00a0 the Berkman Center for Internet and Society<\/a> were discussing if Twitter and its tweets were \u201ca revolutionary form of communication.\u201d<\/p>\n That was our way of framing a discussion about this new-fangled Twitter thing that seemed to be everywhere in the media \u2014 or at least in the media we Internet-philes read, blogged and shared. Whether it was the best way to frame the discussion is questionable, but we wanted to have a stab at the conversation, too.<\/p>\n Some of the takeaway points include:<\/p>\n So full disclosure. I am part of the 90 percent of users<\/a> who opened a Twitter account, puttered on it for a bit and then puttered out. As far as I can tell, I have no need for it. It\u2019s not revolutionary or even a useful tool for me. I\u00a0 tote my laptop with me everywhere and can communicate in a faster manner on Internet platforms with many friends\u2026like, ya know, writing here on this site, or posting something on Facebook.\u00a0 The majority of my teched-out and tuned in peers\u00a0 in the room felt the same way.<\/p>\n Yet, I think we failed to articulate how the global conversation has changed and could change even more because of Twitter:\u00a0 In light of the recent Iran elections<\/a> and the subsequent Twittering<\/a> that followed the controversial results, it seems that the ultimate revolutionary use of Twitter\u00a0and similar SMS services may not be in the US and already heavily-connected and broadbanded regions, but\u00a0in areas of the world where mobile phones\u00a0 have the high penetration rates.\u00a0 Often, these same regions have news and information services that don\u2019t always (or ever) function in\u00a0a democratic fashion.<\/p>\n In India<\/a>, Kenya<\/a>, and now Iran, Twitter and SMS have become important\u00a0 tools for connecting and coordinating isolated populations \u2014 both physically and politically\u00a0 \u2014 with each other and then enables them to broadcast that dialogue around the world for others to iterate on.<\/p>\n In Iran this week, Facebook groups, blogs and political websites supporting Moussavi were shutdown as\u00a0his supporters rushed to the Internet to voice their frustrations about Ahmadinejad\u2019s victory. But the re-routed Twitter feeds from Iran served like a collection of political SOSes and kept the Iran election dispute highlighted\u00a0 in the press of the US, Great Britain and other parts of the developed world as well. That\u2019s an important change in the global dialogue, and\u00a0 it may prove to be revolutionary in more ways than one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most of us in the conference room were white, 20-somethings. Most of us had the latest laptop propped open on our legs or table with 20 different websites open, clicking, typing, and procrastinating. Dare I say it, most of us were probably only half listening to the\u00a0 Oxford-style debate going on in the conference room. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ldklein\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n