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. [↩]

One of the claims made by Patrick in his defense of crowdsourcing:

Fifth, all the humanitarian organizations present during today’s meetings embraced the need for two-way, community-generated information and social media. Yet these same organizations fold there arms and revert to a one-way communication mindset when the issue of crowdsourcing comes up. They forget that they too can generate information in response to rumors and thus counter-act misinformation as soon as it spreads. If the US Embassy can do this in Madagascar using Twitter, why can’t humanitarian organizations do the equivalent? [my emphasis]

I responded:

Is there any evidence at all that the US Embassy’s Twitter feed had any impact at all on the course of events? I mean, I know it made a good headline in external media, but I don’t see how it’s a good example if there’s no actual evidence that it had any impact.

Patrick’s evidence was an assertion that the rumours didn’t spread. I find this to be implausible in the extreme, and I’ll let Jeff Allen explain why:

When the Liberian banks started charging a differential exchange rate (the same as their partner banks were doing in London), that reality-based fact morphed in the street into “the banks don’t take little heads”. The US Embassy put out a press release to try to stop the rumor. It said, “Dollars are dollars, big head or little. Every dollar anywhere on the planet can be exchanged for any other, and they are all dollars.” Which would be true, except it’s not. If you try to bring $10,000 from Liberia and spend them in the US, the odds that you have a counterfeit bill in there someplace are high enough that you’ve probably brought (on average) $9994 instead of the $10000 you thought you did.

In any case, a press release from the embassy certainly wasn’t enough to stop this story. Whether becaused they beleived the rumor, or because they just didn’t want to be the only one not believing it (the musical chairs effect), within a few days the vendors stopped accepting little head notes. This was a few days before payday, and several staff brought the story to me, worried I would pay them in little head notes that they could not spend in the local market. I showed them the newspaper, and told them a dollar is a dollar. They told me, “a dollar I can’t spend isn’t a dollar”.

This is my experience of dealing with rumours in the field. Most of the time, trying to counter them is a waste of time – you just have to work around them. In this case, MSF withdrew all the little head dollars from their financial system, and the problem was solved. Notice that the US embassy press release failed to reassure the market, and I don’t see why a twitter message (or any other web-based tool) would have any greater effect (even if Liberia had better connectivity than it does). This isn’t just a theoretical question, it has serious practical implications:

PS: Think rumors are funny? Managing rumors and knowing when to give up and get out of the way is serious business for humanitarian aid workers. Here’s an article about 3 Red Cross workers killed due to a rumor. My boss didn’t make the decision she made because she’s a nice lady. She decided this wasn’t a rumor that we were going to kill, and we needed to get the heck out of the way of it.

I agree that the humanitarian community needs to improve its communication in the field, particularly with beneficiaries, and that there are a range of tools with which to do so. However we need to be realistic about what those tools can achieve, and in this case recognise that when we feed “facts” into the rumour mill, it won’t stop the rumour mill from grinding – those facts just get all churned up with all the other rumours into a great big tasty rumour pie.