Shlok makes a good point about Twitter and Iran:
"Twitter’s feed is not an effective way of understanding what’s happening on the ground. It was useful seven months ago (much smaller audience), yes, but not anymore. Data overflow has rendered the presentation stack ineffective. At the minimum, a real crisis-Twitter would process data (not just provide a raw feed)."
There's a constant arms race between aggregation tools and design methodology and the ever-expanding flow of information. Twitter worked for a while as an aggregation tool but it's not working anymore. I would argue, though, that the focus and reliance on tools to aggregate and channel information is what is part of the problem.
The key thing that people looking to understand the situation through social media need to think about is how they look at information. The problem with the notion of the information consumer is that the consumer's constant aggregation of information through the proliferation of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook traps them within a cybernetic loop that gives an illusion of understanding. The end result is a kind of "database animal" constantly desperate for raw data devoid of context. With each up to the minute information update the hunger for more information grows. The image that comes to mind is the classic cyberpunk sci-fi figure of a human being plugged into a giant machine.
RAND analyst Carl H. Builder notes in Command Concepts that the cybernetic concept of command and control (C2) features the commander as the receptor of a massive amount of information processed through command nodes. This, Builder argues, turns the commander into an information omnivore who is constantly hungry for (and dependent on) massive amounts of raw data. The anecdote to this is the notion of the "command concept"--the guiding pre-set vision of the battlespace from which successful engagements are won.
In an event like the Iranian protests, the most important immediate thing for an observer to do is to build a kind of "command concept" of the basic parameters of the situation through a more old-fashioned kind of information aggregation: going to the library. Strategic information like the nature of a country's political system, elites, cultural cleavages, etc is more important than tactical updates that may or may not be true. Users dependent on tactical information are usually easy prey for memes that sound commonsensical but actually are products of lazy thinking and mirror-imaging.
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