the Armchair of El Diablo

News Cycles & AntiTwitterganda

By now, you’d know that Twitter broke the bin Laden operation story, via IT Consultant, Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual).

That Twitter got the collective scoop is, in itself, old news now. We’re used to hearing about rumours that flare into gossip, then burst into news from the tweet-vine.

What we’re less used to is hearing how Twitter provides two things sorely lacking in news today: context and perspective.

When @ReallyVirtual started his now famous tweetstream about flyswatters and helicopters, he didn’t only inform the interverse about the minute-by-minute happenings of a clandestine operation.

He did something far more important:he made the foreign less alien.

With emoticons, fluent English, and deadpan jokes you’d expect from any IT guy in your office, he managed to convey a context that was far more familiar than the baffling images of minarets, burning flags and AK-47s that we’ve come to automatically associate with Pakistan.

John Stewart joked that ‘Abbatabad’ was exactly the sort of place name that New Yorkers would have invented, if they didn’t know the name of the place where the operation occurred.

The truth of the joke is that we deliberately use preconceptions and stereotypes to separate ourselves from the fact that bin Laden was a person – albeit a total douchebag of one – living amongst people who are actually not too different from ourselves.

This is a very convenient perspective to forget in times of war… or when we want to simulate a time of war. The alienness of foreign countries is important to promote when we want to do things there, we wouldn’t otherwise do here.

In today’s Crikey, Pakistani resident Wajeehah Sabahat wrote:

“Tears flowing down their faces, anguished facial expressions, bearded faces. These are the pictures from Pakistan news about people mourning and protesting for Osama bin Laden. What the international media repeatedly fails to mention is that these pictures belong to a very small clan of people, who do not share their views or opinion with the majority of the population.

I am talking about people of Pakistan, who watch movies, listen to music, play sports and live life in a normal way and who are devoid of any sadistic sense of brutality or vengeance.”

Through Twitter, @ReallyVirtual, provided a tweet stream of consciousness that was unfiltered, and without agenda; providing a context that made the (often inconvenient) similarity of people a little harder to forget.

As a result, Twitter provided a news source that was crucial to the story not for its immediacy, but its raw reality.

6 May 2011