Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe Not Yet, But It Could Someday
It's hard to imagine anything more far out than the suggestion that the founders of Twitter be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, especially since the people who invented the internet never were. But that's what Deputy National Security Advisor, Mark Pfeifle, argues this week in The Christian Science Monitor, because of the company's role in supporting the ongoing uprising in Iran. Pfeifle isn't the only one making this argument, either.
MG Siegler found Pfeifle's editorial and reported on it; he seems to think it's funny - and it is. I think the idea is also serious enough, though, to warrant some closer consideration. I think those little narcissistic bites of information and the platform people publish them on are serious enough to warrant taking this opportunity to consider what it all really means. You might assume that these most recent platitudes are just about Twitter's celebrated role in Iran - but in fact there's a lot more going on. Twitter is changing the human experience in important ways, for those fortunate enough to experience it.
Why Do People Care?
Some people believe that Twitter represents a general state of self-absorbed thoughtlessness in a culture drowning in pointless, irresponsible, self-indulgence and celebrity obsession. And they think it's stupid.
In fact, almost everyone thinks it's stupid until they give it a good honest try. I certainly did, until I decided to give it one single week of attention in a limited professional context. That was several years ago now and my embrace of Twitter ended up being anything but limited. I wrote once that Twitter is paying my rent, because I get so many story leads, quotes and other valuable tidbits from it. This week three out of my last four articles here have been about Twitter and I am about to buy my first house.
That's not why Twitter should be awarded a Nobel Prize of course, though I do appreciate it. At this point there may only be a few thousand people in the world making extensive use of Twitter for work - but that number will grow.
Some people try Twitter because the media talks about it a lot, some try it because friends are on it and others try it because they are told that they must, lest they become terminally un-hip and get put out to pasture.
Once you're there, though, and once you make a meaningful number of connections on the service (something that's still too difficult for new users to do) then Twitter becomes much more than just another website.
There's a reason why so many journalists, lawyers, moms, animal doctors, students and other normal people are so obsessed with Twitter - and it's not because they are flighty, superficial people intent on telling the world what they ate for breakfast.
Remember when Wikipedia was laughed at, because anyone could edit it? Most people feel differently about that site now, and it's not hard to see a future in which many more people will come to appreciate Twitter as something more important than they do today. Just like Wikipedia has become one of the best tools to include as part of any research project (no one argues that it's a definitive source) so too could Twitter in particular and "microblogging" in general end up on the short list of the best ways humanity has to communicate with each other.
What Is It, Really?
The creators of Twitter deserve big accolades because they have invented what could be compared to a newly discovered, very usable, radio-wave frequency. It's a new plane of communication. It's truly world changing.
Twitter isn't like SMS text messages because the visibility of Twitter messages isn't limited to a finite set of intended recipients. Twitter messages are both personal and public, targeted and broadcast, experienced individually and available for aggregate analysis by anyone who cares to process them.
Twitter is synchronous and asynchronous. It's for one on one, small group and very large group conversations. All at once!
It's a place for serendipitous discovery of the unexpected and it's a place you can go to find answers to very specific questions.
Perhaps most importantly, it's a tool that lets messages leap from person to person, from one friend network to another, in a matter of minutes, all over the world. Email enables that as well, but there's honestly a significantly greater amount of friction to sending an email than there is retweeting a tweet.
It does all this and yet it's just a box that asks "what are you doing?"
By looking into the flowing river of conversation, made up of the contents of all those little "what are you doing" prompts, a simple program can tell you (for example) that people who like knitting and live on the West Coast of the United States have been particularly active in discussing topics X, Y and Z in the last hour. What other tool on earth allows for all that?
Twitter is like a field of energy, buzzing with thoughts, feelings and information around the clock and accessible in many different ways.
An Open Network of Networks Could Be A Real World Changer
At least, it could be like a field of energy. Instead, right now, it's just a company that made some software. It's like the telephone, but it's not like the telephone. There are other telephone companies, but you can't call them and they can't call you if you are on Twitter and they are on, say Identi.ca or Yammer.
And that's why the founders of Twitter probably don't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. They have built a company that is threatening to transcend into being a phenomenon, but for now it is still a company. It's not as bad as the hermetically sealed Facebook, a related service with more bells and whistles, far less flexibility and visions of a cradle-to-grave empire. But Twitter remains limited and colored by its own business limitations. It remains a closed network, for one thing.
It's being used to change and document history in Iran but those messages won't be publicly available in a matter of virtual moments - try going back through Twitter search results, they just stop at a certain not-too-distant point in the past. If someone isn't doing something to change the lack of accessible archives on Twitter, it's absolutely criminal. (Martin Luther King Jr. probably wouldn't have won the Nobel Prize if he'd been unable to recount anything he'd done prior to a month before!)
Twitter is too opaque in its management and noxiously condescending in much of its official communication with its own users. That condescension is frustrating but it would be a mistake to assume that there's not a whole lot of thinking going on behind the curtain of PR at Twitter. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, was a co-founder of Blogger, another world-changing company that largely gave way to the paradigm it helped usher in and to other service providers. He's a smart man and is, no doubt, surrounded by smart people pumped up and thinking about the fact that they work for one of the most exciting companies on the internet.
Twitter is a magical thing. It will be even more magical once it opens up to communication with other networks, solves the problem of archiving what could be historically important conversations, facilitates greater amounts of conversation analysis and of course, grows in size. It's safe to assume that all of that is being worked on, at least by some people working at Twitter.
Those are the kinds of changes that will make Twitter a more powerful tool in the service of global communication and understanding, of peace. Decentralization, archiving and other foundational features of a robust communication system could make a big difference in the next Iran-type situation. Once those things happen, this new medium will be all the more worthy of really big public recognition. Even before that point, it's not at all an absurd idea to discuss.
For a counterpoint to much of this thinking see this long post critiquing the Twitter/Iran connection by Max Forte of Open Anthropology.
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Marshall - spot on - I think they've popularized the public micro-messaging medium which has potential as the most accessible, participatory public medium in history. It is already shifting the use and form of the web and there is a tremendous opportunity but also some ugly looming issues like scalability, interoperability, and data portability/availability.
I've setup a charitable initiative to help advance the medium and it's potential benefit to society. An initial deck is up here for any interested. First launch event anticipated for September.
http://slideshare.net/MichaelLewkowitz/changemedium.
Cheers!
It has great potential, but needs a lot of work. It is too reliant on third party software to make sense of the noise and is therefore not adopted by mainstream society.
And it doesn't seem as if the people at Twitter are interested in advancing in this direction.
Great post Marshall.
Most insightful post on twitter I've read in a long time
@L1AD
oops... that should be http://slideshare.net/MichaelLewkowitz/changemedium
Excellent piece. Very thoughtful and very well written.
Posted by: Bob Boynton
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July 7, 2009 11:23 AM
(linkback) Yes or No? Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? [VOTE] - http://www.pikk.com/48273
great post. twitter is like a slice of our collective consciousness. it's the fluid and immediate sharing of thoughts and experiences. sure some are vain and obnoxious, and some are absolutely important to our humanity.
magical? if not, its pretty damn close.
Great points Marshall. While the media world is in a whirlwind honeymoon with Twitter, it is still just the vehicle its the people posting that is driving the change. There is definitely plenty of Tweets going on with little or no value, but it's Twitter's use to get the word out of what is happening in Iran and from other world-changing events that are a triumph to its core value for humanity.
absent in all this reporting about twitter and the nobel peace prize is a more important question, who is Mark Pfeifle, and why is he pushing this so hard. in fact, why were all the neo-cons pushing the #iranrevolution so hard, when less then a year ago it was all about bomb, bomb, bomb… bomb, bomb iran?
i realize tech blogs don't generally do politics, but the political issues around the hype are really the actually interesting questions that need to be answered.
open anthropology had a great piece of analysis that peels away the hype and tries to determine what was *actually* happening on twitter concerning iran. the answer is that it was less about iran and more about americans, and it may have even caused more problems than it helped. it’s totally worth reading:
http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/06/17/americas-iranian-twitter-revolution/
peace
When sth happens, block twitter!
Marshall please read us all a favor and read the Openanthropology post linked by Peter C above... I can't believe readwriteweb is drunk with the twitter coolaid too...
Terrible article. This ranks up there as one of the most annoying Twitter articles I have come across. Not only does it overstate the importance of Twitter, but overstates the importance of the people who created it and those that use it.
What Twitter REALLY Is: A simplified blog platform in which each post, or status update, is limited to 140 characters. Each user can add and remove friends to track. Twitter then analyzes user status updates to produce popular trends.
Twitter has no political aspirations. Plenty of people use other platforms to talk about politics and similar topics, but they get no love.
Stop exaggerating the importance of Twitter.
Peter and Michael, thanks for that link to the Open Anthropology article. It's certainly an interesting read but the author writes like he has a real chip on his shoulder and something to prove. A great reminder that I don't want to write like that. Also, anyone who complains about "too much noise" loses me pretty quick.
Brant, your description of Twitter neglects the links between users created by public replies, the existence of direct messages, the standardized fields for location and user description (thus making analysis easier) and the significant improvement in ease of use over long form blogging. It's so much easier to do that it's a different animal. There's a lot there that you are missing. And as someone who uses Twitter extensively every day to keep up to the minute with friends, co-workers, industry associates and others - as someone who has thought about it a fair amount - I don't believe I am exaggerating the importance of the service.
I don't think I've seen anything that better demonstrates the web 2.0 reality distortion field.
If you're looking for a more deserving platform how about Alexander Bell? I'm sure that over a 100 years of history the telephone has already contributed so much to the peace than twitter's differed network maintenance.
Or how about the craftsman that made the chairs on which negotiator's fundaments rested at Versailles. The chairs made a contribution! Then again, maybe not Versailles didn't work out so well in the long run.
Or wait a minute, how about we continue to award those inspiring individuals who make direct and personal contributions to promoting the peace.
If mentioning twitter along side such people is not a joke, is it surely an insult.
It has great potential, but needs a lot of work. This is the over-reliance on third-party software to make sense of the noise, there is no adopted by mainstream society.
Twitter hyperbole is starting to resemble Chuck Norris "jokes"
Posted by: Ben Foster
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July 7, 2009 10:22 PM
My personal prediction is that this sort of excessive lauding of a piece of web-based software will look ridiculous in a few years' time.
Any linking of Twitter and its creators or users to peace is really nonsensical. The platform is quite neutral. It occurs to me that Twitter could just as easily (if not more) be used to organise local ethnic killings or mobs of vigilantes. This will inevitably happen at some point in the future and I imagine the discussions of the evils of Twitter will be just as fervent then as the current discussions of how "good" it is. It's neither - it's just a communications tool.
Radio, for example, is often used to promote peace and development around the world. But then it was a key factor in organising and exacerbating the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda in the 1990s. It is also a neutral technology.
But you're right about it being closed being a key point. I can't see how in the long run it will make much difference to the world unless it's opened up. But the flaws and noise of Twitter content will not promote peace, as noted by some of the naysayers in the comments here, and the article a couple of them linked to.
Marshall - You need to turn off CNN and FOX news and do a little research on what's actually going on in Iran. This article is ridiculous.
Some people believe that Twitter represents a general state of self-absorbed thoughtlessness in a culture drowning in pointless, irresponsible, self-indulgence and celebrity obsession.
To some extent, yes.
Surely there must be some more deserving candidates out there. If not something is truly wrong with the world.
Does Twitter Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize? Not Yet, But Maybe Someday http://bit.ly/JprT7 [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2517176916]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 16, 2009 12:02 PM
this Twitter Nobel Prize post easily wins my most loved & hated post of the last week award. http://bit.ly/qjMNT [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/2527722862]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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July 16, 2009 12:02 PM
I'm pretty sure the nomination was to generate buzz, RT's, and Digg's because it really makes no sense to nominate a platform and not it's creators. Along different lines, it would make no sense to nominate Twitter in this case - after all, hasn't Google helped more people find and share information on the Iran elections than Twitter? Why isn't Google nominated? Or the Internet itself? Tim-Berners Lee should be awarded far earlier than Twitter ever should (discussed in depth at http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/once-a-knight-is-not-enough/).
Twitter is a platform, dependent on many other platforms... It's just a form of communication that hit that perfect blend of critical mass and network effects sooner than other offerings. Although it's awesome and really fun/effective, it's definitely not worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
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Sure why not they gave one to Obama and he hasn't done anything to deserve it yet...