As the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and now Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, and Libya show us: quite a lot. The use of social media by young people in these countries to organize and galvanize their compatriots was unexpected. The way professional journalists and the international community have taken up Twitter to understand these struggles is a phenomenon very few people could have predicted
As a writer, I was first encouraged to get onto Twitter when attending some workshops on how to get the attention of a publisher. I kept putting off: they were talking to someone who joined Facebook nearly five years after it launched. It was on my to-do-list but it just never got done – mostly because I kept forgetting whenever I was on the computer. The miracle of the Hudson river plane landing in New York City was reportedly broken on Twitter as someone looked out the window of his/her apartment. Still, no one seemed to know quite what to do with these bite sized packets of information.
Then, one night, alone at a café in Damascus, Syria, taking a break from my Arabic course, I decided to check it out.
The scrolling page of top tweets was saying something shocking: Michael Jackson had died.
I called my husband who was at home in Qatar.
“They’re saying MJ died,” I said in disbelief, thinking this Twitter thing was a big prank after all.
“He did,” my husband replied. I was then in shock (and mourning followed immediately afterward for such a misspent life).
Needless to say, I was hooked. But I still didn’t know how or when to tweet. And living in Qatar, a small community whether amongst expats or nationals, I was self consciously about tweeting particularly since my account was tied to my Linked-In account.
I didn’t want my professional network knowing everything only certain things. So I restricted myself to one Confucius like saying a day. I sometimes scanned what others were saying but that was it.
Then a whole group of twentysomethings joined us at work and critiqued my Twitter style. It turned out I wasn’t tweeting often enough for them. I explained my dilemma: one person pointed out the obvious solution – you just marked tweets you wanted to go through with the #in. Clearly Twitter had gotten much more sophisticated when I wasn’t online.
This new fact was revealed to me at the same time that I got a birthday present: a Smartphone. The two together coupled to make me a frequent and more liberal tweeter. Leaving all my friends on Facebook without Twitter accounts reading only half the conversation.
From MJ’s death to the independence of Egyptians from Mubarak now to the mounting struggles for liberation from inequality, injustice, and corruption, Twitter delivers the type of news I’m most interested in, in digestible highlights just right for a working mother.
@mohanalakshmi
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