Cyber-optimism: Twitter as an Act of Truthful Speech

Throughout the Queensland’s floods in January, Twitter was abuzz with hashtags like #qldfloods and #thebigwet¹ as individuals on the ground swamped to Twitter with updates.

In effect, Queensland’s tweeps challenged the emergency services’ traditional monopoly on information. To borrow from Terry Flew, crisis reportage was “deinstitutionalised”² as the boundaries between Twitter’s “de-professionalised”³ news streams and the official news narrative collapsed. ABC recognised this and launched a flood crisis map that integrated crowdsourced information from Twitter, email and SMS into emergency coverage.

ABC created a flood map that integrated crowdsourced information

from Twitter, SMS and email. [Imagesource: Crikey]

Twitter as a Parrhesiastic Utterance

It’s a fantastic story about what Twitter can accomplish, and in the wave of cyber-optimism, it’s encouraging to see Twitter as a dutiful practice in truthful speech—or parrhesia. Foucault used this Greek word, which translates to “all-telling”⁴, to analyse the politics of truth.

At its best, Twitter can be a megaphone

for parrhesiastic speech. [Image source: Tropo.com]

Read in Foucauldian terms, Twitter creates two conditions that allows parrhesia to be in play:

1. There is a speaking subject involved⁵: A tweet is a public action which reflects the speaker’s willingness to authenticate his/her verbal commitment to a specific matter, like a national crisis.

2. The act of speaking makes a difference⁶: Twitter’s network model establishes relational ties between users⁷, ties signified by the green “follow” icon which Henry Jenkins suggests is a display of solidarity. This triggers what Clay Shirky calls a “positive supply shock” to the spread of information: by professing their tweets before an assembled body, users can correct the shortcomings of knowledge in the group.

The story of Twitter is an immensely positive narrative about the power of citizen reportage, but there are also pitfalls. Tomorrow, Editor Zed will take a closer look at the less-than-utopian side of Twitter.

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[1] Liam Mannix, “How Twitter is mapping the flood crisis—and whether you can trust it”, Crikey, 12 January 2011, http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/01/12/how-twitter-is-mapping-the-flood-crisis-and-whether-you-can-trust-it/ (20 August 2011).

[2] Terry Flew, New Media: An Introduction (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2008), 110.

[3] Flew, 109.

[4] Matthew Sharpe, “A Question of Two Truths? Remarks on Parrhesia and the ‘Political-Philosophical’ Difference”, Parrhesia 2 (2007): 89.

[5] Sharpe, 90.

[6] Sharpe, 90.

[7] Flew, 86.