The question in the title was asked today by queen Rania al Abdullah of Jordan during the second day of the LeWeb conference in Paris. How important, how relevant is Twitter or more in general the searching in conversations as they happen?
Queen Rania is a celebrity using social media such as Twitter (@queenrania).
What actually is a queen doing on Twitter? As she explained, it is a good way to circumvent the limitations of protocol. People also feel less inhibited talking to her using social media.
More importantly, queen Rania uses social media to make people aware of the fact that worldwide 75 million children are not in schools. That of course is a tragedy: for each additional year kids go to a good school, they’ll earn more later on and the chances to die from AIDS diminish. The queen is heavily promoting a worldwide action to mobilize people and politicians for this issue, using Twitter and the site Join1Goal .
Maybe you’ll say “well, that’s easy. No risk for a member of a royal family to promote schools.” However, queen Rania went beyond the “doing good” stuff (and of course, the cause of education for those kids is of tremendous importance).
She talked about the protests in Iran and the role of Twitter in those events. But, she explained, then Michael Jackson died and all of a sudden Iran was no longer a “trending topic” on Twitter and it was no longer trendy. So how important and serious is Twitter?
Here is queen Rania:
Queen Rania was not the only speaker to ask questions about the relevancy of social media for the real world. Danah Boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow aan het Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, confronted the participants with the uneasy internet issues.
Racism on Twitter for instance. Or social networks where kids are bullying each other, where stories are being told about abuse, about gangs.
We are used to discuss the privacy-issues related with the fact that so many personal details are available on the web. But sometimes the problem is not that we see certain things about each other, but that we don’t want to see them, because they disturb us, because they don’t fit in our context.
When a neighborhood child gets injured, people intervene (let’s hope). When we see problematic behavior on social networks, we often prefer not to pay attention. Instead of actively looking for stuff which is outside our usual framework, we prefer to ignore those things.
Again, this message was more complex. Sometimes we do look, but we don’t pay enough attention to interprete what’s happening.
Boyd told the story of a young man in Los Angeles who wrote a beautiful text about his desire to escape from his crime-infested neighborhood. On the basis of this text a top university started an admission process. In that process it was discovered that the young man had a MySpace page, which had all the usual signs of a gang member. The shocked admission officials concluded the boy was a liar.
Boyd intervened. In her analysis she explained that the boy actually had to survive in a neighborhood where gangs were extremely important. His MySpace page was part of a survival strategy. A different, and far more documented interpretation of his behavior on a social network.
Here is Boyd’s presentation:
So, can the real time web change the real world? Yes, it can. Like queen Rania said: “Real time is the new prime time.” It is the way in which news is distributed, in which we collaborate and it is a mouth piece for action. Boyd underlined that in the we are the ones who decide what we want to see, how we see and what we do with that.
Roland Legrand
