Tweet fightin' Iran? Maybe not

Tweet fightin' Iran? Maybe not
By Clarence Page
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/pagespage/2009/06/tweet-fighting-iran.html
June 18, 2009
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/pagespage/2009/06/tweet-fighting-iran.html


Reports of a "Twitter revolution" in Iran's streets may be, as Mark Twain said about reports of his own death, rather premature.

Worldwide media have had a fiesta with stories about Twitter's role in stoking multitudes of angry Iranian youths into the streets. The social network's role was so widely celebrated that the U. S. State Department is reported to have asked the company to put of some scheduled maintenance just a few hours -- from June 15 to early the next day when it was about 1:30 a.m. in Iran.

"I wouldn't know a Twitter from a tweeter," our apparently non-tweeting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during an appearance with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman Wednesday. "But apparently, it is very important."

Sure it is, if we in the media say it is, and we've been saying that a lot. But is it really?

Business Week says the tweet story is a clunker. Most of the communication was by old-school SMS text-messaging or even older-school word-of-mouth, says Business Week.

Toronto-based Sysomos finds only about 8,600 Twitter users in Iran, based on what they indicate in their profiles.

Wired News warns "before you have that Twitter-gasm" that reports in the Western press indicate only 10,000 and 30,000 Tweet followers. "That’s a lot," a Wired writer conceded, "but Ashton Kutcher it ain’t."

Besides many of the those followers are in the U.S. and other countries that are not Iran.

But by the time the hype evaporates Twitter will have had its biggest publicity bonanza since the Mumbai hostage crisis. That's when the very young company made worldwide news as the medium by which tweeting witnesses gave us a tick-tock of the morbid action as it unfolded.

Still I ask, during those long dull days when you are not being held hostage by terrorists running around with street revolutionaries, why tweet?

I appear not to be the only person asking that question. For all the hype that Twitter's 4.5 million accounts have generated, a brand new report from the Internet marketing firm Hubspot indicates more than half have never tweeted or have no followers -- or have never done either one.

I understand why people might not tweet. Most of the people who use other user-generated sites like YouTube and Flickr don't contribute anything, either, according to this 2007 report from Hitwise. I'm one of those folks. but at least YouTube offers you a lot that's worth watching. Twitter, by contrast, gives you such exciting events as "I am filling up my gas tank now."

That helps to explain why a lot of people neither tweet nor follow.

It also backs up my prediction that Twitter is going to be the CB radios of the new century.

Or those of you who are too young to remember CB radios, think eight-track tape players.

At least they could give you more than 140 words at a time.

In Fairness, my friend and prominent blogger Andrew Sullivan disagrees. He seems to think Twitter is the best thing to come along since sliced bread. He's entitled to his opinion. To me, Twitter is the great enabler for those who are intent on doing what's ruining literature and political discourse today: Writing without thinking.