TwiTsMAG.COM

twibbon.com was created by stormideas to provide an easy but powerful way to promote your cause.

Twitter moved beyond its initial remit as a social networking tool to become an overt weapon of dissent over issues of national and international importance. Days of national mourning are declared and practically officialised by an unchallengeable Twitocracy as celebrity after another passes away, leaving behind them their online legacies of micro-obituaries (microbituaries???) summing up their relative importance to the world in 140 characters or less a thousand times over. Green-tinted thumbnails line the computer monitor as users vent their virtual frustrations over the spiralling political debacle in Iran.

What makes these large-scale acts so impressive and unique is their visual dimension. Beyond colours, the channeling of a ‘voice’ in the Web 2.0 age implies size, substance, shape, taking the form of tweets or comment boxes. When we think historically of protest, we think in pictures: Martin Luther King at the head of the podium, his right hand raised. The actions and consequences of The Tianenmen Square protests in 1989, that occurred at a time of worldwide governmental reform (or collapse) on an unthinkable scale, are now almost rendered secondary to the compelling symbolism of THAT man with his shopping bags and the oncoming tanks. The sustainability of our fascination with this image is surely linked to its residual power as an astonishingly appropriate visual metaphor for the act of mass protest; an ‘everyman’ of the people pitted quite surreally against the faceless, destructive and infinitely stronger enemy.

When the team behind the Email Standards Project harnessed their grievances about Microsoft Outlook 2010 to develop fixoutlook.org, they weren’t trying to address a pressing humanitarian issue, but simply trying to garner support for a campaign that would improve just one aspect of many people’s future working and personal lives. Be that as it may, in its swine flu-like viral success – attracting more than 25,000 sympathisers on Twitter – they have inadvertently cultivated a defining analogy for the convenient and immensely powerful framework for digital protest now available to the Web 2.0 generation.

twibbon.com was created to give you your voice in this new world. In just 2 minutes you too can Start Something!