US State Dept. Sends Twitter to Iraq
Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is visiting Iraq to bring the microblogging service into government and civil society there. In an interview with CNN's American Morning (embedded below) Dorsey says he hopes Twitter can help make the new Iraqi government more accessible and help spread good news from Iraq out to the rest of the world. Dorsey is traveling with a State Department delegation hoping that new social media will facilitate greater social stability in Iraq.
You'll see in the video below that CNN Anchor, Kiran Chetry, asks silly questions about terrorists using Twitter (it is available on cell phones, which terrorist have used) and about Oprah on Twitter. There's a reason why traditional media is being so effectively challenged by emerging media - the latter is more interesting and in many cases acts more like a meritocracy.
Hardly just a novelty, Twitter is a rapidly proliferating communication platform that is helping define a new era of technology as centuries old media models are disrupted. Put that into the aftermath of an 8 year war of historic importance and what does CNN have to say about it? "Tell me about terrorist tweets and Oprah." Nice. This isn't a USO show with dancing girls, this is an important act of free market, bottom-up, tech-based international diplomacy.
Twitter was among a number of web technology companies that visited Iraq as part of the US State Department delegation. Other participants included representatives from AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, YouTube, Automatic/Wordpress, and Blue State Digital.
State Department spokesperson Robert Wood explained the intent of the visit:
During their visit to Iraq, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building.
Jack Dorsey is the third co-founder of Twitter, but our understanding is that he is uninvolved in day to day operations. Instead, he travels the world talking to people about Twitter. You can follow his updates at twitter.com/jack.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
These people lack clean drinking water ( http://www.mercedsunstar.com/corinnereilly/story/768520.html ) and have intermittent electricity yet we are trumpeting bringing twitter to Iraq. Brilliant.
JJRay, that's a pretty classic arguement but communication is important as well. Stability is a neccesary precondition to the delivery of social services, so if Twitter can help with that more power to them. Accountability in the set up of services like water delivery is also something that could be made easier with more accesible communication. US aid to Iraq has been pretty murky - maybe Twitter can help the process in that way too.
I think you are both correct in a way, however as Marshall point out, opening more channels of communication can spark action.
Howard Rheingold makes this point in his seminal book "Smart Mobs", where he opens chapter seven with an account of how Manila residents toppled the Phillipine government without firing a shot. It was all thanks to the power of SMS and the people's will to organize and change their government. As you may know, Twitter is largely based on SMS... think 140 character limit.
In my opinion, this could be a game changer. I also dismiss the argument that the terrorists will use it to coordinate; they have much better ways to do that than to use Twitter.
All forms of communication help everyone, some for good, some for not-so-good. The more easily people can communicate the better for everyone. Terrorist have surveillance problems to deal, with which pretty well rules out their using twitter.
I can appreciate jjray's comment on the silliness of twitter coming to Iraq compared to more urgent problems, but doing so may help these more urgent problems.
Wondering:
Can Tweets be written in the Iraq local languages: Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian, Armenian
Using the required characters?
thanks.....
For helping to create suck an interesting piece of technology, Jack is surprisingly boring in this interview. I don't feel any passion coming from him.
I will definitely spread the word, my friends who are more into this thing would love this, thanks for the post.