"Ambient journalism" fueling Wisconsin labor uprising.

Twitter has become a media agent of change, from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Iran and in the streets of Madison, Wis., where protestors both pro- and anti-union used the social media to report the latest news and information.

After Iran's disputed 2009 election, protesters gathered throughout the country, organized quickly through new, networked communication technologies, including text messaging, Facebook and Twitter. In late 2010 and into 2011, other nations in the region--most notably Egypt and Tunisia--saw similar sudden uprisings driven by the quick, decentralized flow of information across social networks.

Twitter may be the tool that does the most to disseminate information in these protests. Twitter allows users to distribute messages of up to 140 characters, including links to content on the Web via computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

It is similar to the text-message and e-mail tools used by past protest groups, such as those of the "People Power" revolution in the Philippines or the "Battle in Seattle" anti-WTO protest, but provides much greater physical and informational accessibility. A 2010 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported 59 percent of American adults are now mobile Internet users, meaning the potential diffusion of this technology into political activity can happen anywhere.

Twitter made its first big splash as an American protest tool in February, when Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) announced his intention to strip about 175,000 public employees of their collective bargaining rights. In response, tens of thousands of protesters occupied the Wisconsin capitol building and its surrounding square. Those early events led to a period of semi-permanent protest both within and around the Capitol. During the first month of protests, Twitter users--both supporters and opponents of the protests--sent more than 800,000 tweets using the #wiunion tag.

Because of the way it connects information accessibility of the Web to the physical and temporal immediacy of text-messaging, Twitter can be used as both a modernized form of protest communication and as a kind of citizen journalism. Twitter's users can act as de facto wire editors, redistributing selected commentary and news to their followers, as well as contributing their own thoughts or first-hand reporting.

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A recent study at Southern Illinois University Carbondale tested the idea of the #wiunion Twitter stream as an ambient journalism outlet. Although #wiunion was not the only tag used in discussion of the bill or its attendant protests, it was the most central and provided the broadest coverage of discussion on both sides. The analysis covered 775,030 tweets, 63 percent of which were re-tweets--that is, tweets users had received and then forwarded to their own followers.

After a while the number of links decreased, suggesting that users' behavior changed over time, from a tendency toward redistribution of information from other sources to more frequent expression of original information. Faster and more portable networking dramatically alters the ability of individuals to publish instant, live information across different media--text, images, audio and video.

Digital communication tools dramatically speed the process of communicating within any organization, including social movements.

Too, such tools make informal communication much easier between a movement and unaffiliated but sympathetic individuals, as well as decentralized communication between and among those individuals. While using social network sites and other new media to mobilize might be seen as a modernized form of protest communication, this phenomenon clearly is a still-developing kind of citizen journalism.

Aaron S. Veenstra, assistant professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale's School of Journalism, co-authored the research from which this article is taken. Co-authors include Narayanan Iyer, Namrata Bansal, Mohammad Delwar Hossain, Jiwoo Park and Jiachun Hong. Their research will be presented in August at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference in St. Louis.