A lot of people ask what the point of Twitter is, a web application that allows anyone to write short sentences about anything at any time that others can follow. Some of you will also be asking what Twitter has to do with humanitarian issues since I am writing about it here… you’ll see.
The question of the usefulness of Twitter was something that I asked for a while, but I signed up anyway. I figured if so many people were getting involved then its usefulness would probably reveal itself at some stage, and for me it did reveal itself quite strongly around one event – the Mumbai attacks in November last year, with the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower (hotel).
Of course, Twitter has a strength in a purely social sense where it’s about friends staying in touch. With new phones that allow data connections it has the ability to reduce the need for text messaging and it allows for broader conversations to take place over phones than what simple text messaging allows. But there is a much bigger side to such social media that should be making traditional journalism wary of the growth of tools like Twitter.
During the Mumbai attacks, traditional media were producing reports very quickly. Digital capabilities allow for stories to be created and broadcast at a great rate of knots compared to what was able to take place in the past. Those reports gave us the bare facts. While the traditional reporting was going on though, there was another form of journalism that was taking place at a much quicker rate and with a lot more emotion – citizen journalism, using tools like Twitter and Facebook etc, there were updates and pictures coming out of that situation from bystanders at a rate of hundreds per minute.
People were snapping pictures with their phones and getting them uploaded to the Internet onto things like Flickr and Facebook much faster than a traditional journalist could do it and get it to the public, and short, sharp eyewitness updates were coming out via Twitter extremely quickly and with all the emotion a citizen on the scene would offer.
It doesn’t take much to see the strength in this for the development/humanitarian sector. Whilst a certain amount of discernment is needed to see past the bias of the citizen if necessary (as one needs to do with most traditional media now as well), there exists the ability, via social media, to gain a very quick picture of various humanitarian situations. It also offers development/humanitarian workers the ability to connect people directly to their work and the situations they offer their service to. Imagine being a development worker and being able to directly keep people up to date with what you’re doing at whatever pace you like and in so doing, being able to paint the picture of the work that you do. Imagine being a person who supports the work in the field and being able to get a first-hand account of the work that you support.
No longer do development organisations and their supporters need to rely on traditional media to let the public know what’s going on in the world, via the use of social media, development organisations can engage their supporters and other interested parties in dialogue and discussion and can keep them informed directly.
Next week I begin my journey as TEAR Fund’s Education and Advocacy Manager in New Zealand and it is my intention do to exactly that; to use social media to bring the work and world of TEAR Fund New Zealand to the public to discuss global issues, to hear your thoughts and to allow you to connect with the people doing the work so you can hear their stories and understand what they do. In so doing, TEAR Fund will be able to hear you, sit with you and talk with you.
This blog will become a part of that, alongside tools like Twitter, Facebook and anything else we can use to effectively communicate and build relationship with anyone who wants to chat.
If you wish, you can follow The Humanitarian Chronicle on Twitter here and on Facebook here. Keep coming back here to see some new developments happening for TEAR Fund in this area as well.
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