Election on Twitter

Much focus has been placed on the importance of television in the UK General Election (as for the first time there have been three live TV debates between the leaders of the main political parties) - This however has occurred at a time when the internet has played a major role in the election.

The "digital election" has been well reported, from interesting (though at times silly) blogs, more series articles on the phenomenon, as well as the websites and social media accounts of candidates.

One example of Web2.0 at work in the election is this attempt by the Guardian for readers to assess the campaigning in their constituency. Readers simply enter their post code, the party campaigning and a rating from 1-5 of how "active" that political party has been. The map is formed by users tweeting the data to them:

Tweet your score, postcode and the party abbreviation with the hashtag #ukvote - eg N1 LAB 3 #ukvote or CV32 CON 4 #ukvote -

What does this have to do with digital history? Isn't this simply election journalism in the internet age? Well I thought about this for a while, is this really something of historical value?

I think that this is of historical value as it potentially shows us where political parties are focusing on, it provides a lot of data albeit in a rather simplistic way. In twenty years time if we were to assess the 2010 UK General Election it might be of use to look at a collaborative effort such as this to see where campaigns were highly fought.

Twitter in Elections:

The screen shot above is from my Twitter account, while I was using a Google Chrome extension for Twitter. The image is annotated to show the differing tweets from those involved in the General Election.

Tweeting History

Previously I looked at the role of Twitter, today I wanted to go back to one of the underlying themes running though my blog, the issue of recording history, looking at how Twitter presents challenges and opportunities for historians.

In background reading on the importance of Twitter I came across many articles articulating the value of Twitter for historical research. Shown best by the decision of the US Library of Congress to archive "the collected works of Twitter" stating that "tweets are becoming part of history.”

As mentioned in my previous blog on Twitter most tweets are rather banal, relate to only few individuals and probably have little or no use to any historian.

As a student of diplomatic history I am all to aware that I often ignore the importance of historical resources simply because they do not relate to my notion of a valuable sources. Historical studies which look a the wider society, role of popular culture etc. will potentially see huge benefit in the recording of tweets.

Why are tweets of historical value?

Future studies looking at attitudes towards Sarah Palin during the 2008 US Presidential election may find some benefit in looking through tweets made during her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, by then perhaps more efficient methods of analysing huge quantities of data will have emerged allowing for trends to be spotted.

Because tweets are short (a maximum of 140 characters), time stamped and made by so many individuals they are perfect for meta data analysis (if that is not already a term it ought to be...) which is so useful to many historians.

The rise of Twitter

David Cameron once joked that he refrained from using Twitter because "too many tweets make a..." Anyway, at the start of this year there were as many as 55 million tweets being made daily, so while Cameron may be avoiding the social networking website, not everyone else is!

Twitter is being described as the "new Facebook", the extraordinary growth of Facebook in 2008 was being matched in percentage terms by Twitter in 2009.

What is Twitter?

• A micro-blogging website.
• You have your own account like other social networking websites.
• Posts are limited to 140 characters.
• You can "follow" and be "followed" by other users.
• The # key is a tag.
• Tagging allows users to see other "tweets" on similar topics.

Twitter's potential

Until the Summer of 2009 Twitter was seen as yet another internet craze but within a few days it became discussed in the media and being reported on news programmes (such as Newsnight on BBC2). This was because of the role Twitter played in the post-election period in Iran.

In 2009, people in Iran and Moldova created their own searchable tags on Twitter to organize protests against their governments and share information with each other and the world. In April, Moldovans used the network to rally more than 10,000 young people against their country's Communist leadership. And in June, Iranian opposition supporters angry over presidential election results used Twitter and other forms of new media to share news on rallies, police crackdowns on protesters, and analysis.

Twitter became such a vital source of information in Iran at a time when text messaging and mobiles phones were being blocked by authorities. This was shown by the fact that the US State Department even requested the company delay a planned shut down of the site for maintenance, showing the site had become crucial in the coordination of anti-government protests.

As well as being a force against authoritarian governments, Twitter is becoming a vital tool in other ways. The head of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal stated that the website was a tool in mass communication to troops. In the UK during the General Election campaign tweets related to the election are being posted using a variety of tags (including #ge2010 or #ukelection) allowing for everything from the latest opinion polls to spoof posters to be shared.

The success of Twitter is down to the fact that posts are limited to 140 characters, thus you get a short and brief message - like TED, you get a big idea in a few minutes!

#

No the # was not a typo! Tagging is central to understanding twitter. By tagging your posts (using the # and then a word connected to the topic) it allows for debate and collaboration to occur through the site.

Education & Business using Twitter

If Mike Cosgrave had his way, he would "be well past discussion forums and making them use Twitter" by getting students to use the tag connected to their course (ie. #Hi2007) Twitter as a tool in education is a separate issue, but it shows other areas Twitter can be of use in.

Businesses have been entering the social networking arena in recent years with varied success, Twitter is no exception, as print media advertising becomes less popular (and is increasingly reaching an older demographic) the Twitters of this world are becoming a popular tool to reach people otherwise not accessible to companies. It does have dangers for businesses, as furniture shop Habitat discovered when they tried to piggyback on the popularity of Iranian election tags.

Conclusion

David Cameron might be right to avoid using Twitter based on the number of politicians red faced after making inappropriate comments on the site, or worse sharing the banality of their lives. Twitter is however being used by huge numbers of people and for a huge variety of purposes, which is helping it maintain its success. It is easy however to see it as a place for people to share with their friends what is in the contents of today's sandwich or what they thought of that penalty decision in the final minutes of a match - however it would ignore a huge amount of what Twitter is about and why people use the site.