Web n.o

Context :

November 26th, 2008 marked one of the watershed days in Indian History as probably the single most significant event in India in the last 15 years played itself out - the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. As the news started coming in, I would imagine, the TV news channels probably grabbed not just a large share of the TV viewership but probably a very substantial portion of the population’s attention. As an overridingly large proportion of the 1.13 billion population of India, and a large number of people from over the world focused on the TV news, a completely different newsworthy event was starting to emerge.

Twitter and Micro blogging :

Back in August, I had mulled on the potential of Twitter Search. As I watched the drama unfold on the TV in real time, I started my laptop and checked out the handful of favourite news sources (TV Channel sites, Newspapers etc.). Most of these were substantially lagging behind what was being announced on the TV. Having run through the favourite news sources, I decided to checkout search.twitter.com, I entered Mumbai in the text box and pressed search. Even in the dark hour, I was alert enough to start realising the following.

• The messages were coming in fast and furious. While I did not actually measure the update frequency, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be around 5 updates per second during the busy hours.
• While I was busy flipping the remote buttons to move across the more than 10 major news channels, each channel had an exclusive lock on me. If I was watching one, I could not watch the other. And most of the coverage that I missed, I would hardly get an opportunity to review it later. Twitter had hundreds of users furiously pumping in messages. They were coming all together in one channel (search.twitter.com : #mumbai), and I could go back in time to review the messages posted by users earlier.
• In the past, I had an opportunity to watch, judge and form an opinion on most of the channels and the journalists covering the events. Getting a message from someone I knew, and realising that was a rarity on the twitter channel. I didn’t know 99% of the users and had no idea about their past history or experience to form any opinion about them.
• I also started realising a few things about the nature of the messages themselves :
  • Noise : There was just a tremendous noise on the channel. The information kept on coming in furiously, much of it was repeat or retweets. If I was asked to rate the noise level - I would call it almost 99%. Less than 1% of the tweets actually told me something new, something I was interested in and something of significance.
  • Lag : Most messages announcing news lagged the TV channels by a few seconds to perhaps a few minutes.
  • Lateral Content : There were some unique contributions that twitter could make which could not be made by TV and perhaps even by some of the internet capabilities like websites and blogs. As people started creating content using wikipedia pages, web sites, blogs, twitter got them to the end users. An example of this additional information was the list of the injured and the dead (which by the way someone was maintaining quite rapidly using google docs), blood donation appeals and contact points, helpline numbers etc. I repeat - as blogs and other online content mechanisms started creating content, someone twitted about it on the #mumbai channel. Using twitter allowed me to have access to a broader set of information, some of it supplanting and complementing the TV coverage.
  • Emotions : While practically everyone was deeply emotional and agitated at the moment including many of the journalists, the emotional outburst on Twitter was much stronger. Yet the impact of the emotion expressed by the TV crew was much larger which to me seemed to indicate that distant text based messaging could not compete with an audio visual engagement with the real and known people on the TV just a few feet away from you.
  • Bullshit pollution : There was some pollution from some rather obviously extremely opinionated people (conspiracy theories and the like), which at least I was surprised how quickly I filtered out with my brain tagging it bullshit. This is how I experienced it, not sure if it was the same for others. Though I guess at times what may seem bullshit may later on seem wisdom.
  • Second hand news : Very very few posts were actually first hand reporting. In most cases, people were either reporting what the TV channels were reporting, or offering their opinion or analysis or emotions. This is very important to note, because though most foreign media lagged twitter stream, the twitter stream lagged the Indian media (which is why many in the press are thinking Twitter was trumping CNN). This is simply a function of the fact that different news network have different capabilities in different regions of the world, whereas twitter largely is likely to have a relatively homogeneous capability since all it needs are a set of enthusiastic volunteers.

A completely uncalled for distraction :

Even as these events were playing out another interesting event started playing itself on the second day. CNN-IBN, CNNs Sister channel in India, broadcast some news about another round of shooting that had started on the railway station. Soon the Twitter stream had picked it up, and I also saw messages talking about additional attacks on GT Hospital and RBI (the Reserve Bank of India). As it turned out these were incorrect news bytes. But in a nation horrified and inflamed by the events unfolding in front of them this was a wholly unnecessary injection of additional anxiety. In one of the moments of alacrity from the State Government (which was accused of being slow under some of the most critical circumstances), I slowly started watching the TV news channels being taken off the air. Imagine this moment - TV programming consisted of entertainment, sports but no news and the twitter feeds were talking about a new round of attacks that had “apparently” started. In the meanwhile, the twitter feeds also started chattering about the channels going off air, and mobile phone networks getting either shut down or jammed. This was a scary moment where I incorrectly assumed that the tragedy was simply assuming even bigger proportions. I called up my friends to realise not everyone had their news channels blacked out. Those with cable TV (me included) had their news feeds cut off whereas those who had subscribed to satellite TV had all the news channels still on air. How so ? The cable TV was under the control of the State Government and the local Police who once they realised the enormously damaging implications of CNN-IBN’s broadcast simply pulled the plug on the news channels. Apparently no news was better than incorrect and inflammatory news. Satellite TV was not under the state government control. For once I look back, and despite my decidedly liberal views, believe this was one situation where state control helped. It took an on air apology from CNN-IBN’s editor and on air appearances from Senior officers immediately to dispel the rumours before the channels slow started coming on air again (We of course didn’t get to see the apology, and CNN-IBN of course stayed black for a while). I assume that somewhere in those 15 minutes of blackout, the Government read out the riot act to the news fraternity. Of course, twitter channel covered these apologies and denials soon thereafter. Why is this important ? There were three different control points for the flow of information - each state government controlled the cable TV and the phone networks within the state, the central government or the state government of the broadcasting station / uplinking facility controlled the satellite networks, and twitter if at all would need to be controlled could only be controlled by the U.S. government (I am not aware of twitter servers being outside the U.S. hence the assumption).

Post Tragedy :

Subsequently people slowly started writing about the role of Twitter in Mumbai 26/11. It is interesting to note that out of the approximately 1.13 billion people most of whom were completely glued onto TV, anywhere between 32 to 60 million had access to internet. Of them only a very small proportion (my purely speculative hunch would be < 1%) were twitter users (thankfully for twitter since each user was getting his page refreshed every few seconds). So effectively far far less than a million people globally (twitter apparently has about 6 million user accounts globally and probably no more than a few hundred thousand in India) were being served by twitter. Its important to keep things in perspective especially when one comes across titles such as “CNN quakes as Twitter rapid fires Mumbai news“. I think twitter was very very useful, and the event was an exceptionally powerful demonstration of the power of microblogging in the future but the keyword here is the future. And then we had another opinion - “I Can’t Believe Some People Are Still Saying Twitter Isn’t A News Source“. News source ? I might agree to it but only with a caveat. It was not a news source like the print media or TV channels. It was a news source similar to another news source we use today extensively - telephone and intra-mob communications. Here is the key differentiator - With Print Media, TV channels and to a lesser extent with well known and established blogs, there is authenticity (though that does go for a toss at times), an image of established credibility, a traceability, and accountability. None of it exists for the twitter channels. In the rare event that you get a message from someone you know, it acts like a phone on steroids - phones generally do point to point communication, twitter broadcasts. In most cases it acts like a communication channel in the busy bazaars of yore - massive noise, lot of screaming and drowning out, largely unknown participants in the communication channel, and yet having a tremendous power. Power ? You bet. To look at a possibly negative manifestation of the power, you must only imagine the miscommunications that result in a gross amplification under a bazaar scenario, which result in extreme crowd behaviours such as stampedes. Incidentally, the reason why CNN-IBN went on air to announce new shootings in the railway station and which subsequently I heard references of additional shooting near GT hospital and RBI on twitter streams, was the fact that in one crowded railway station, the metal detector fell down resulting in a large noise due to its falling down. The anxiety manifested by a tense crowd can easily blur the line between news reporting and news manufacturing. This is nothing but what could happen on twitter except that it happened in the physical world. Mob behaviours do not follow rational patterns (anyone seen the stock market graphs and many other financial institutions performance lately - institutions which are supposed to follow highly rational and often mathematically precise models for behaviour). It is not difficult to imagine that a microblogging stream which is tremendously useful 99% of the time, behaves dysfunctionally in 1% of the situations leading to catastrophic results (again the financial markets are a good example of occasional dysfunctionality of a crowd behaviour causing disproportionate damage). However crowded bazaars have existed for centuries, only to transform themselves into networks of virtual trading stations. These will continue to exist for a few more centuries. I suspect microblogging has established itself and promises to unleash an immense power in the years to come. Its no longer relevant to question its potential power. It is wise to accept it as an eventuality, and then figure out how it will play itself out in the future and how to deal with it. That topic forms the remainder of this post.

The future :

So lets look forward to a world where microblogging is an established communication channel along with the phones, the emails, the newspapers and TV. While microblogging will have an immense power to influence things for the better or for worse, it is unlikely to compete with the traditional news sources where such news reporting is well established and adequate. In such situations, it will play the role that phones, emails and blogs do today in terms of complementing and supporting traditional news channels (print and TV). While microblogging will lack the authenticity of the traditional news sources, it still will play a powerful role because of its broadcast / publish-subscribe characteristics. It could swing and influence events and capability far more than phones, emails and blogs. However in situations where news gathering capabilities have been insufficient or damaged, such as in underprivileged contexts, natural disasters etc, microblogging could take on a role similar to that of amatuer radio - essential communications and news sources.

A cause for concern :

In case of a tense breaking news scenario, can a team of 5-10 dedicated microbloggers collectively representing about 50 different online accounts actually start manufacturing news ? A lie told a thousand times often becomes a truth, and in tense group situations it needs nowhere near a thousand iterations. Probably just a handful will suffice. As subsequent investigations show, the terrorists in Mumbai first opened fire in the railway station to get the local police distracted so that they could get into the hotels easily. Is it possible that if they had some accomplished accomplice microbloggers pulling off a deliberate disinformaton and counter information campaign, they could’ve further amplified their capabilities and the resultant destruction ? I don’t know for sure, but I do not feel comfortable enough to say that that will not happen. I am certain that for government agencies (intelligence, law enforcement, information broadcasting etc.) and perhaps even the perpetrators will be tuned onto the microblogging channels the next time. And they might not be passive listeners.

Impact on large Political, Social, and Corporate bodies :

What if a corporate body was about to face a public relations nightmare on the scale of “2008 Chinese milk scandal“. What if someone wanted to swing public opinion radically for a short period of time leading to a substantial shift of power as in the “Madrid Train Bombings“. Information is today both a currency and ammunition and microblogging is the new gun on the block. I suspect Government Agencies, large Non Government Organisations, large Corporates will require to put in place both a strategy and a tactical infrastructure to execute a “microblogging strategy” and a “counter-microblogging strategy”. As it becomes powerful, control over such channels will also become increasingly relevant including abilities to shutdown, eavesdrop, and most importantly ability to influence the information flow. Microblogging as a vehicle beyond social communications, and as a potential ability to deeply transform fast moving events, is here to stay.