humanitarian.info

Here’s another thing to throw into the mix. Part of my thoughts (parts of my thought?) was generated by a post by Ethan Zuckerman entitled Watching Madagascar, via Twitter. He starts off strong:

The nature of breaking news is changing… The (confusing, apparent, partial, incomplete) coup in Madagascar is the first event I’ve been able to watch only through social media.

But a few paragraphs later, the big reveal:

So I’m doing what my Malagasy friends across the net are doing – religiously watching the #Madagascar tag on Twitter. That means I’m primarily reading Thierry Ratsizehena, a marketing and social media expert in Antananarivo, who is listening closely to news via television and radio, and sharing what he knows with his Twitter readers. Lova, who’s in the US, is translating his tweets into English and adding context and commentary.

I don’t doubt that these two were working as an “effective news bureau” for Ethan and other interested observers, and this is clearly a useful service in the Twitter manner, but I couldn’t help but notice something that Ethan had slipped in there. Thierry Ratsizehena was “listening closely to news via television and radio” and then sending that on to Twitter. While Ethan may have been literally watching events through social media, he was getting all his news from television and radio. Ethan’s not making any claims for Twitter but in this instance I’m not sure Twitter is doing much more than ham radio would?

I don’t want to harp on about Twitter, really I don’t; it’s pretty much irrelevant to any of the work that I’m likely to be doing in the near future¹. The reason I find the coverage of Twitter interesting (rather than finding Twitter itself interesting) is that in some senses it’s clearly a fad (in the same way as most technology journalism is fad-based) and in some senses it clearly represents a shift in the foundations – although I don’t think that it is that shift, which is what the breathless news coverage tries to suggest.

Perhaps it’s as simple as this. As our traditional media dies off (as per Clay Shirky’s recent article), people are looking for something to take its place. In this case, Twitter looks like journalism – they’re broadcasting reports from on (or near) the spot! – but it isn’t journalism, and it doesn’t possess the powers of organisation that people seem to think it should at first sight. We want it to be journalism because we want something to take journalism’s place – or in Ethan’s case, fill the gaps that his traditional media leaves in his coverage of the world. In countries where traditional media retains its position – particularly radio, which shows little sign of dying out in developing countries – journalism is alive and well, and in fact provides the raw material on which Twitter users draw.

1. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that it won’t be relevant to any of the humanitarian work that I’ll do in the future at all. [↩]