I am hesitant to enter a dialogue that starts with Plato and the great God Theuth but in this context I want to comment on the exchange between Jovan Kurbalija and Aldo Moretti on Twitter. Part of me is fascinated by the story that Jovan tells of how he uses twitter and the way that it is becoming integrated into his everyday routine. Part of me is puzzled that there should still be debate about the utility of Twitter, and that it should still be subject of mockery when its global adoption is rising like the tide and many diplomats and MFA are active on the space (see #ediplomacy #digitaldiplomacy).
The mockery of Twitter as trivial misses the point, in my opinion. Jovan mentions tweets that say, "I just left my home" and adds " (who cares?)" The answer is, of course, the people in that person's network. I think neither author gets under the skin of Twitter. It can be used to broadcast, but it is first and foremost a social media. Examples range from the dramatic to the banal: from the brave, Egyptian, dissident blogger in the time of Mubarak who tweeted precisely, 'I just left home' and repeated his progress through the day (he was talking to the people who feared and cared what happened to him) to the myriad of less dramatic examples where daily - hourly - updates serve a social purpose: families, work colleagues, lovers, travellers all use the medium simply to keep in touch. This openness and accessibility is of course why so many are worried about Twitter’s recent moves towards country level blocking. And its social genes are why organisations - including MFA - who don't allocate resources to engaging a community fail in online social spaces. It is also where we find the latest expression of the fuzzy thinking which, in his later blog, Aldo celebrates as one of our essential survival skills as a species.
There is something very powerful about age in this debate. The division between digital natives and migrants can be – and has been – overplayed. But there is more than a grain of truth in the assertion that people who have grown up using digital media take it for granted as an integral part of their daily life. That is a different starting point from those of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era of fixed-line phones and broadcast media monopolies. That doesn’t mean older people can’t become fluent in the new languages and integrated culturally, and indeed change the culture as we join in numbers. But we are startled and disbelieving as a result of the pace and scale of changes, and the sheer innovation of something like a broadcast status message – and who on earth would have known what that meant in the 20th Century?
(Cross-posted from the Diplomacy Foundation website blog. We support Diplo communication)