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. [↩]

Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter!

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police. The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

Here’s how it went down:

The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate – I’ve been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes – and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with “pman” (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English)… All in all, while it’s probably too early to tell whether Moldova’s Twitter revolution will be successful, it would certainly be wrong to disregard the role that Twitter and other social media have played in mobilizing (and, even more so, reporting on) the protests.

Or did it?

In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple – young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and “mourning Moldova” because of Communists victory… They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc…. That was a civic protest, which grew up out of a flash-mob initiative organized through blogs and social network connections, and then which grew even bigger as the protesters used mobile phones to summon their friends and classmates.

Apparently it didn’t.

Mihai Muscovici… suggests that the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong and there is scant mention of the organisation of the protests at all apart from a rather vague quote the Times has put in at the end of the piece… As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth. What happened, and is still happening, in Moldova is a protest organised using social media.

Last word to Evgeny:

It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It’s really good that the Moldovan students didn’t organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world.

Indeed. The reason I’m posting this – even though it’s not strictly speaking “humanitarian” – is because it shows three things which to some extent follow from each other:

1. It’s hazardous to use press coverage to determine what tools are being used and what tools are working in a crisis. The press frequently have even less understanding of the tools than they do of the crisis, and they <em>will</em> focus on what’s “popular”. It’s very difficult to verify the claims about these tools while the crisis is unfolding, so I find it hard to blame them – they need people to read their stuff – but the people making the claims need to be more careful.¹
2. They need to be more careful because media coverage of technology is the product of the echo chamber that dominates the technology sector – and steers the media when it comes to reporting on technology. No offense to all those tech guys providing their opinions to the media – they are smart, no doubt – but because they’re tech guys they love Twitter, and discuss it a lot, so that’s the headline we read.
3. The good news is that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have demonstrated their utility as organising tools in advance of a protest; mobile phones we already knew are of maximum utility even while the crisis is full on (right up until the network goes down). Twitter – maybe good visibility for people on the periphery or further out, but I’m just not convinced that microblogging in general is of much use in a crisis. Head over to Jon’s place for the opposing point of view.

1. To be fair, in that initial article they only refer to Twitter as part of a suite of tools, but the general tenor of coverage has been “The Twitter Revolution” or something similar. [↩]