DigiActive.org

Social Media Hype Tracking

The Moldova “Twitter Revolution” Hype Curve

How quickly excitement about a new social media tool evolves into charges of “hype.”    On Monday April 6th, a small flash mob collected in central Chisinau, Moldova, to protest the recent elections.  The following day a much larger and rowdier crowd gathered and the Twitter hashtag #pman appeared, referring the location of the protest, a square called Piata Marii Adunari Nationale.

The world took notice of two things: 1) People are rioting in the capital of Moldova. 2) They seem to be using Twitter to organize the protests.  The second observation, being the more unusual, became the headline.  On the 7th and 8th both the traditional media and the bloggers were harolding the “Twitter Revolution“.

In a few hours the backlash came.  Evgeny Morozov, responsible for one of the first Twitter Revoltion posts,  wrote a new post with caveats.  Turns out there are too few twitters in Moldova for it to be an effective organizing tool.  Blogger Daniel Bennett pointed to evidence that there was no cell phone coverage in the square, making live twittering impossible, and called the revolution meme a myth.

But that cynical view, just like the enthusiastic one first put forth, was not the end of the story.  The final version of events, promoted by such writers as Evgeny Morozov, Ethan Zuckerman, and Kate Brodock of DigiActive, was that Twitter played a role, though one of increasing international awareness rather than for organizing, that Twitter was only one of several social media tools used, and that journalists’ (and bloggers’) fascination with Twitter was also a large contributing factor to the popularity of that narrative.

The hype curve had moderated itself.  Moving from enthusiasm to backlash to cautious optimism.  Final verdict: Twitter is useful for activists but not game-changing and the enthusiasts and cynics were both over-reaching.

Hype Tracking for other Social Media

Twitter as a tool for digital activism came out of this a bit bruised, and unfairly so.   Too much was attributed to it during the “revolution” phase.   It was unfairly criticized during the backlash and was made out to be less useful than it is.   This got me thinking, has this hype curve occurred with regard to other digital activism tools and, if so, can we expect similar patterns in their rise and fall from glory?

“Hype” is a difficult thing to measure and by necessity requires a proxy variable.  I chose Google Trends, which ranks a term relative to all Google searches over a given time period.  (Please let me know if you can think of a better proxy.)  I tracked searches for four prominent (and much-hyped) social media tools used for activism: blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. All data is from today, April 16, 2009.

The blog data is the most useful because it goes back the furthest.  Searches for “blog” (our hype proxy) grew steadily from early 2004 to mid-2007 and then plateaued.    I interpret this plateau to mean that the hype around blogging has “died,” although blogging has not.  There has been a backlash to the blogging hype and the “post-blog” meme, referring to the popularity of new social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, has had some traction.  Yet blogging continues to be extremely popular to a general audience and useful to many digital activism campaigns.   It seems to have passed successfully through the hype where it is not longer the answer to every advocacy question, yet has been shown to have lasting value of an accessible means of creating alternative narratives.

YouTube is a little different.  It seems to be following the blog hype trend, with increased interest since early 2006, yet, beginning in 2008, it seems to plateau.  However, its Search Volume Index is still pretty high, which means that the hype around YouTube may not yet have peaked, so it’s unclear whether it will follow the hype-backlash-normalization trend.

Facebook was the slowest to gain the exponential growth of hype, which did not occur until early 2008.  Though its popularity is continuing to move skyward, the backlash may be beginning.  After her group page was hacked, Nisha Susan, the creator of the famous Pink Chaddi campaign, wrote in a recent e-mail, “As my friend says, the first rule of Facebook activism seems to be don’t use Facebook.“  In addition Yahoo! Fellow and DigiActive correspondent Gaurav Mishra listed several “perils of Facebook activism” in a recent post on his blog, Gauravonomics.   Is this the beginning of the activist backlash against Facebook?

If we define hype as popularity increase over time, then Twitter is the most hyped tool of all we’ve analyzed.  Not only does it have the highest overall Search Volume Index, it has also expeience most of its growth in popularlity over the last 4 months.   As such, it’s not surprising that it is experiencing an activist backlash now, as at least some of its meteoric rise is not a reflection of its true value.

Conclusions

This is not to say that these tools are not valuable for activists.  They are, every one of them. Yet we should be careful in both our hype and our castigation.  Though as an aggregate these tools may be game-changing (and that’s why we at DigiActive are interested in them), no single tool is going to finally bring down tyranny by acting as the activists’ silver bullet.  We must present these tools carefully, being sure to define clearly how their attributes can make them useful to activists, as well as being clear about their shortcomings.  By not being overly enthuiastic about these tools we can avoid the backlash which causes them to be under-valued by activists as mere hype.