I was asked to appear on yesterday’s Ed Doolan Show on BBC Radio WM to discuss Twitter and the current situation in Iran (known to Twitter users as #iranelection). I duly prepared three key points I wanted to get across. Despite the interview being scheduled through the Birmingham City University press office, and Ed Doolan’s producer calling me to confirm my time slot of 12:15pm, they never called. As I’d prepared something to say, here’s what Ed missed:

1. Twitter is still a niche activity but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful. Earlier this week social media commentator Clay Shirky said that the whole world was watching the Iran election. Shirky, if you don’t know him, is the superstar social media thinker but he does tend towards hyperbole. If the whole world was watching, they weren’t watching on Twitter but on mainstream media. Sure, Twitter is a useful communication tool. Twitter users have talked about Iran, Iranians have documented events and disseminated them via Twitter, but mainstream media organisations have picked up parts of the story on Twitter and then talked about it more widely. Shirky’s right to highlight Twitter’s importance, but the role of other media is lost in a lot of what he and others say.
2. If Twitter’s so important, we need to worry. Twitter’s hosting partner was planning downtime for Monday which they postponed in light of the way the service was being used in response to circumstances in Iran. The decision may in part have been a response to pressure from Twitter users who were lobbying for a delay in the service downtime. It was a good decision, and a good PR move by the hosting company. However the downtime still happened a day later, with the situation in Iran still far from stable. For me this highlights a vulnerability: Twitter isn’t a public service, it’s a commercial organisation.  More importantly it’s a commercial organisation that lacks a clear business model. Twitter could disappear overnight and its users would have little right to reply. Other services might appear to fill the gap, but there would be a delay. If Twitter is as important to global communications and democracy as commentators and users say it is, then we need to ask questions about its sustainability and viability.
3. Twitter is not overtly political. Twitter as I experience it tends to be liberal leaning and pro-democracy but that’s because I choose to follow people who have similar values to me. My Twitter community is interested in how Twitter works and how social media works. We tend to celebrate the way in which social media is levelling the media playing field and revitalising the public sphere. We tend towards Shirky’s evangelism of social media and mass participatory action. However, I wonder how much action is actually generated from a lot of the Iran related Twitter activity I can see amongst my network. Many of the people I am following have turned their Twitter avatar green in support of Iranian protestors. Many have re-tweeted (forwarded on) proxy addresses to help Iranians circumnavigate state controls on the Internet. I can’t see any of my network generating original thought or tools here: we seem instead to just be going through a set of social conventions, identifying ourselves as active and useful members of an online society. A lot of the activity I can see is less about Iran and more about keeping up appearances. That’s not to say there’s not value in showing support, but we need to be realistic about what this activity is actually achieving.