Twitters Role within Society - Essay Example

Section/# Twitter’s Role within Society and the Likelihood of it becoming the 5th E As has been described in the past, the First Estate represents the Clergy, the Second Estate the Nobility, the Third Estate the Commoners, and the 4th Estate the Press; however, the Fifth Estate has not yet been named and represents a yet unknown entity within the fabric of society. For purposes of this brief analysis, this author will seek to lay out the question for whether Twitter will come to represent this Fifth Estate due to the seemingly ever-increasing power that such a platform has on the national and international identity for so many individuals within the current world system. As a means of performing such an analysis, current and past attributes as well as key and decisive moments in the platforms growth and development will be discussed and analyzed as a way to categorize whether or not Twitter is already or will one day become the fabled 5th Estate. Since its introduction in July of 2006, the site has registered users in excess of 500 million individuals with over 340 million individual tweets on a daily basis. These statistics alone help to paint the picture for how widespread and powerful such a platform is within the realm of human interaction, global response to key issues, and media interpretation (Brock 2012, p. 6). Indeed, with nearly 10 percent of the world’s population registered on the site and able to both view and respond to a host of different topics, issues, and concerns, the means whereby this global online community can shape the ways in which issues are understood is profound (Thurston et al 2012, p. 69). The true dynamic that should be analyzed and understood with relation to this issue is not the fact that a large group of individuals have access to a wide array of information, opinions, and coverage of topics they may otherwise not have immediate access to; rather, the true dynamic of the situation is the level of interaction that individuals across the globe can have with respect to the information they come in contact with (Faina 2012, p. 56). When one analyzes the 4th Estate, the understand that the media represents its own unique power dynamic and has a profound effect on the way that individuals view themselves, one another, and the issues they are presented with (Bichler 2012, p. 7). Moreover, the 4th Estate has a discernible impact upon how the 1st, 2cnd, and 3rd Estates view each other. However, the traditional dynamic with relation to the 4th Estate is that it is a somewhat, if not entirely, uni-directional process; with the information trickling down from a few media elites and integrating itself within the hearts and minds of those individuals who ultimately espouse or reject the ideas put forward to them. However, what Twitter, and social media sites similar to it, has done is make the process of this informational integration something that takes place outside of the singular bounds of the individual experience (Lasorsa 2012, 408). One need look no further than the case of WikiLeaks to understand the dynamics of press attention as a result of Twitter usage and discussion. Though the website experienced very little widespread media attention prior to the release of information that it became famous for, the discussion and response in the “Twittersphere” as many call it, meant that the press was fully aware of the entity, its intentions and the means by which it sought to gain prominence and interact with individuals (Gayo-Avello 2011, p. 122). In this way, Twitter acted as a type of harbinger of what was to come and alerted the press as to the fact that this was a story worth attention as it would only likely grow in time (Murthy 2012, p. 1060). Naturally, no better example of this power that Twitter espouses can be seen than as has been manifest within the revolutions of the Arab Spring that swept the Middle East. The way in which Twitter was used within the opening phases of these revolutions was as a means to point out rampant corruption and propaganda usage by the governments of the affected nations. However, as the revolutions went on, the level to which Twitter was used both as a tool to expose the regimes and state controlled press and the means by which it was used as a tool of organization ultimately grew, morphed, and became one (Hempel 2011, p. 1). With relation to the role of Twitter in helping these revolutions to gain broad based support within their own countries, this is perhaps the single largest example of Twitter acting as a type of 5th Estate. Says Hussein Amin, professor of mass communications at the American University of Cairo, “Social networks have broken the psychological barrier of fear by helping many to connect and share information. It has given most people in the Arab world the knowledge that they are not alone, that there are others experiencing just as much brutality, just as much hardships, just as much lack of justice. Social networks "for the first time provided activists with an opportunity to quickly disseminate information while bypassing government restrictions” (Amin 2012, p. 76). In this way, one can readily see the means by which Twitter and the likes of it have been able to interject themselves into the political process of self-determination, ideology, and ultimate revolution in a way that only a primal force could expect to do (AGRIFOGLIO et al 2012, p. 33). Although it is impossible to definitively state whether Twitter is already or will perhaps one day become the 5th Estate, the fact of the matter is that it bears a number of key hallmarks that would make it eligible to be called a 5th Estate; not the least of which is its ability to lead the press into many issues and develop popular points of concern for affected groups that may otherwise go unnoticed. In this way, rather than the media being a top down relation of information to the four previously mentioned estates, Twitter and other social media sites, allow for a more full and complete integration of such information with the end user; allowing for the process of communication to extend both ways rather than solely top to bottom. References AGRIFOGLIO, R, BLACK, S, METALLO, C, & FERRARA, M 2012, EXTRINSIC VERSUS INTRINSIC MOTIVATION IN CONTINUED TWITTER USAGE, Journal Of Computer Information Systems, 53, 1, pp. 33-41, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 January 2013. Amin, H. Social Media Evolution of the Egyptian Revolution 2012, Communications Of The ACM, 55, 5, pp. 74-80, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 January 2013. Bichler, K 2012, Médias Media Accountability in Austria in Web 2.0 - To What Extent do Blogs, Twitter and Co. 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Lasorsa, D 2012, TRANSPARENCY AND OTHER JOURNALISTIC NORMS ON TWITTER, Journalism Studies, 13, 3, pp. 402-417, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 January 2013. Murthy, D 2012, Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter, Sociology, 46, 6, pp. 1059-1073, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 January 2013. THURSTON, B, BERGL, S, FEIFER, J, FRIEDELL, D, GUERRA, E, KARPEL, A, KELMAN, E, LIDSKY, D, MCCUE, M, MULLANY, A, RHODES, M, & SCHOMER, S 2012, THE SOCIAL MEDIA ROAD MAP. (cover story), Fast Company, 168, pp. 68-89, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 January 2013. Read More