Making Social Media Do Good March 28, 2011
Posted by Karen E. Lund in Emergency Preparedness, Humanizing Technology, Internet, Knowledge, Mobile, Non-Profit, Social Media, Volunteer.Tags: #UsBlogs, Collaboration, Communication, Disaster, Emergency Preparedness, Humanizing Technology, Internet, Knowledge, Mobile, Non-Profit, Social Media, Volunteer
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Last month I attended Social Media Week New York. As most of my career has been spent in non-profits, I registered for panels on non-profits, international development, and using social media for social good. There was a good deal of discussion about events happening in the Middle East, and opinions were divided on how much (or how little) social media like Facebook and Twitter were influencing the democracy movements.
Friday around noon I returned from an early lunch break for a panel discussion. Every venue (that I know of) had wi-fi, so after finding a good seat I cracked open my laptop to check e-mail and Twitter. Twitter was alive! Reports that Hosni Mubarak had resigned were lighting up my timeline, so I switched briefly to my News list, which was also crazy. But this is a new medium, and the contradictory reports of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in January had shown me that misinformation can propagate just as easily as reliable information. So I quickly looked at the websites of the New York Times, the BBC, and Al Jazeera English. All of them reported Mubarak’s resignation, so I accepted it as true.
Double Check Your Facts. Then Triple Check.
Social media accelerates the flow of information, both good and bad. Rumor and misinformation can spread just as rapidly as accurate news, so confirm what you read against other sources. That first report you read may be true—it may even be a scoop, in which case you won’t find confirmation for a while—but unless you are an eye-witness or know the source to be extremely trustworthy, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
What Social Media Can Do
Before this sounds too negative, I need to say: social media has enormous potential to do good. But like any tool, it’s all in how you use it. Here are a few thoughts on how to make social media do good:
- Stay informed. Develop a trusted network of individuals and organizations that you can rely on in a time of need—or any time. Discover who provides reliable information about topics that interest you (social good or otherwise) and can both keep you up-to-date on current news and be a fact-checking resource when you need one.
- Share. Contribute to the conversation, share what you know from your offline experience, and forward information you glean from your network. When sharing, always double-check before you forward or retweet; be sure that what you share is relevant, useful and that the links work.
- Choose your subject. Nobody can do everything, so focus your attention on a subject that interests you and/or a particular skill you have to offer. By all means stay informed about everything that interests you, but if you’re going to delve deeper, narrow your focus to be most effective.
- Use the best available technology. One of the greatest things about technology is that it gives us so many channels to communicate. Sometimes the difficult part is deciding which to use. In emergency situations, such as the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear hazard in Japan, some forms of communication may be unavailable, so you may not have access to the very best channel—but choose the most appropriate from among those you do have.
- Get involved. Opportunities to do good may be virtual, or you may want to carry your helping into your offline life. Use online sources to be informed, then connect via social media and carry your good deeds forward.
- Collaborate. The thing about social media is it’s… well, social. One person acting in isolation isn’t social, nor a network. You’ll have much more impact in whatever you do if you collaborate with like-minded folks online. So before you rush off to reinvent the wheel, check out what others are doing; then join up with an existing network that matches your own ideals, or start your own project knowing exactly which gap you’re filling.
- Inform your friends, but don’t push. Just because someone likes you doesn’t mean they are passionate about everything that you are—or that they have the time, money or energy to contribute. Let your friends know what you’re interested in, but keep the requests for help low-key; those who want to participate will, especially if they know you’re the person to contact if they want to do more.
Social Media in Times of Crisis—One Example with a Happy Ending
If you have any doubt that social media can do good, watch this CNN report about how Akiko Kosaka, a young Japanese woman attending college in the US, learned on YouTube (YouTube!) that her family had survived the recent earthquake and tsunami. It demonstrates better than I can the ability of communications technology to connect people in time of need.
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Back to My Roots February 17, 2011
Posted by Karen E. Lund in Change, Internet, Learning, Technology.Tags: Change, Internet, Learning, Technology
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Trinity College Library by Nic McPhee
I was a nerdy, bookish child–the kind who got As (if not always straight As; a B or two might slip in, but nothing less than a B), the kind who read under the bedcovers with a flashlight after I was supposed to be asleep. It felt like there was so much to know and I couldn’t seem to soak it up fast enough.
My parents are to blame, of course. They read to me at bedtime from before I can remember, probably before I understood the words. I knew the alphabet when I started kindergarten and then taught myself to read. (I’d memorized the picture books and matched the words to the pictures.)
My Mom would take time to answer any question I asked, and if she didn’t know the answer (“Why is the sky blue?”) we’d go to the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia and try to find out. She was also fascinated by the space program which probably contributed to my curiosity. It didn’t really click until, nine years of age, I stayed up late to watch Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon.
Dad contributed. After he introduced my younger brother and me to baseball, he began to explain the statistics. Long before my class studied percentages I could calculate a batting average, won-lost average, or even an earned run average.
By the time somebody at school told me girls aren’t “supposed” to like math and science, I was getting As in both—and had seen men walk on the moon, seen Earthrise, and figured the earned run averages of every Mets pitcher.
It continued in college. I started as a chemistry major, realized my career as a research chemist wouldn’t go anywhere when I was always the first person to be sick or stoned in organic chemistry lab, and switched to an English major. Only people who didn’t know me thought this was odd.
So when I looked at suggested topics for this month’s Blogger Love project, “Back to School” jumped out at me. Except I have a suspicion I’ve never really left school. Left formal education, certainly. That drastic change of majors required and extra semester to earn my degree and by then I was ready to get out of the classroom and do something. But I wasn’t ready to stop learning.
I didn’t stop learning. Years later—last year, in fact—I combined that baseball stats/chemistry major geeky with the English major who enjoys reading and writing and started this blog. The name Circle of Ignorance came from a friend’s e-mail to me in which he wrote, “So we all have a circle of knowledge and on the circumference is our exposure to ignorance.” In my first post I wrote, “We not only learn things we didn’t know before, we learn of things we didn’t even know existed before. The more answers I get, the more new questions I discover.”
As a Baby Boomer I’ve witnessed amazing things in my life: men walking on the Moon; technology that used to be available only to large business becoming accessible to almost anyone (faster and better, as well as cheaper); the end of the Cold War and now maybe a democracy movement in the Middle East and North Africa. I’ve seen some bad stuff, too. But for the most part my first half century has been an exhilarating show.
I thought about this a bit last week, sitting in an auditorium before a Social Media Week event began. I had my laptop open, tapping into the venue’s wi-fi. Around me were people in their 20s and 30s with iPads and smart phones—and suddenly I had the feeling that my laptop was just a little behind the curve. Ah, but so far ahead of where technology was even a decade ago!
I remember the first time I saw the Internet. We’d gotten connected at work and I started up Netscape on my desktop computer. It was like I’d died and discovered heaven is a terrific library—and the Web wasn’t nearly what it is today. But I could get so much information, so quickly, without visiting a library or worrying that somebody else was using that book. (I don’t believe in an afterlife, but if there is one I hope it’s like Dublin—all the books in the gorgeous gallery of Trinity College library, infinite time to read, with pubs and tea shops a short walk away when I want a break from reading.)
So the bookish little girl I used to be has grown up to be an explorer and a blogger. Back to school? Nope—I never left!
Needed: 21st Century Leaders for an Open World February 14, 2011
Posted by Karen E. Lund in Change, Internet, Mobile, Social Media.Tags: #UsBlogs, Change, Egypt, Internet, Mobile, Social Media, Twitter
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Photo CC Al Jazeera 2011
On Thursday and Friday I attended some Social Media Week events in New York. It was an amazing experience—not just because of the great topics and smart speakers, but because we practiced what was being preached. A fair number of audience members used laptops, iPads or smart phones during the presentations, live tweeting what was being said on stage and their own responses. Some speakers addressed questions posed via Twitter while on stage, while others took more conventional routes such as hand-raising and comments written on index cards.
Thursday I spent most of my time at a long but fascinating presentation on “Open UN: Engagement in the Age of Real-Time.” Unfortunately, when I perused the program handout prior to the start of the talk I noticed that Vodafone Foundation was a sponsor. It was the Foundation, not the corporation, and I’m sure sponsorship was arranged long before Vodafone cooperated with the Mubarak regime in shutting down communications in Egypt—but it still was jarring. (Yes, they were pressured; many people thought they should have resisted a little more. In the end, it didn’t much matter.) The larger world was infringing on our snug auditorium with the wi-fi and a refreshment table in the lobby outside.
Before the panel discussions the moderator, David Brancaccio, instructed the audience to raise their hands in a “time-out” T shape if anyone got news about the speech Hosni Mubarak was supposed to give. If he stepped down during the talk, it would take precedence. Unfortunately for the Egyptian people, Mubarak’s speech that day was as clueless as he previous ones had been.
As clueless as Mubarak, Egyptian VP Omar Suleiman blamed the civil unrest on “television and radio.” How amazingly out of touch! While much of the technologically advanced world debated whether or not this should be called the “Twitter Revolution,” he focused on technologies invented more than seven decades ago.
Six Al Jazeera reporters were detained and their equipment seized, the Egyptian government revoked the station’s broadcast license, and their television signal was blocked. Apparently the 20th century bureaucracy didn’t realize that the station continued its broadcasts in other nations and was available worldwide (in Arabic, English and other languages) on the Internet. Reports of the democracy protests in Egypt were top news stories in almost every democratic (and a few not so democratic) country outside Egypt.
The Egyptian government’s time would have been better spent watching Al Jazeera than attempting to block it: they might have figured out why their citizens were so enraged. Instead they planted their heads firmly in the desert sands and got run over by the modern world.
A tweet (naturally) summed up the situation with an insightful joke: “”Mubarak dies and meets Sadat and Nasser in the afterlife. They ask him: Poisoned or assassinated? He replies: ‘Facebook.’”
Multiple communications technologies make it nearly impossible to stop the spread of information. If one channel is shut down, people will switch to another… and another… and another.
Egypt’s revolution was not only about Facebook or Twitter. Bloggers contributed, independent news media contributed, people used text messaging, cell phones and even landlines to circumvent government shut-downs. Technology makes international communication easy and almost instantaneous. It is not enough to control communication within one’s own borders; the world is watching. Once a news story escapes into the wild and “goes viral” it is impossible for a government to control.
Who, then, would I pick as a model for 21st century head of state? Barack Obama with his Blackberry, or autographing an iPad for an admirer, comes to mind. But President Obama has it easy; he isn’t fighting the kind of internal struggle for democratization that many nations face. He’s a model of a 21st century leader whose country has already arrived. In countries that are still struggling with democracy and development, it’s not so important that leaders know how to use e-mail, Twitter or Facebook; it’s only important they understand that their citizens do and the implications for repressive governments.
My choice is a late 20th century head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev. He guided the Soviet Union through Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness), through a mostly peaceful and non-nuclear disintegration of the USSR and end of the Cold War. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t perfect—but if you had asked most Americans (and probably most Soviet citizens) only a few years earlier if the Soviet Union could be broken up without a war, and probably a nuclear war, few would have believed it.
Gorbachev embraced openness and a move towards democracy, although it eventually cost him his job and even his nation. He conceded a peaceful break-up rather than risk a damaging war. The Middle East needs a few new Gorbachevs. So does much of the developing world. China definitely needs a Gorbachev; they have achieved perestroika (economic restructuring and development) while the Great Firewall blocks citizens’ access to technology, communication and information.
We’re barely a decade into the 21st century; it is too early to say what and how much a role technology and communications will play in world affairs. But it is a safe bet that they will play a significant role of some kind, and leaders who fail to acknowledge the fact will face the same fate as the Mubarak regime: “Poison or assassination?” No, communications technology.
This is another post in the #UsBlogs collaborative project; this week’s theme is “The 21st Century Leader.” For more information about #UsBlogs and #UsGuys, visit http://theusguys.com/blogs/ or follow the #UsGuys hashtag on Twitter.
ICT on the Global Stage: Part 2 – Haiti January 13, 2011
Posted by Karen E. Lund in Emergency Preparedness, Internet, Mobile.add a comment
While Google and China were wrestling over issues of free speech, censorship, intellectual property, global communications technology, and e-commerce, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere suffered a terrible blow: a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti near its capital, Port-au-Prince. The city, planned to house about 400,000 to 500,000 people, held approximately 3.5 million prior to the earthquake. Many lived and worked in substandard, often unsafe, buildings. Unreinforced concrete structures crumbled, other buildings collapsed, and over 200,000 people died. (More have died since due to a hurricane and cholera outbreak later in the year.)
With an adult illiteracy rate of close to 40% and inadequate infrastructure, censorship of Google searches is not an issue in Haiti. Text messages are about as much as most people have access to or have a need for. Following the earthquake, those who had a mobile phone had great need for text messaging and voice communication.
Fred W. Baker III via Wikimedia Commons
In February and March I volunteered for three shifts at a multi-agency resource center in Brooklyn for those affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Supposedly the American Red Cross volunteers were there to assist people in looking for family members on the Red Cross Family Links database, but by my first shift most people knew where their relatives were. What those family and friends in Haiti didn’t know was where they could go to get food, shelter, medical care, or other help.
These were not high-level discussions between corporate officers and government officials. The route to information here was simple, almost low-tech in some ways. Someone in Haiti called or sent a text message to a friend or relative in New York City. That person came to our resource center and visited various agencies to try to obtain help, or at least information. At our table, we looked up information about on-the-ground assistance in Haiti. (Yes, we used Google quite a lot.) A few days earlier another volunteer had discovered an online map of World Food Program (WFP) feeding sites. We downloaded a newer version, asked the Office of Emergency Management to print it for us (we had laptops but no printer), and someone from another agency found a photocopier to make more copies.
We would speak with Haitian visitors about what their friends needed and where they were. Often we went to the large-scale paper map on a table in the center of the room to locate a place as precisely as possible. Then we would consult the WFP map and other information. We always cautioned visitors that things in Haiti changed often; what we had online might not be completely accurate, but we could offer some idea about which agencies were providing assistance in particular locations. “Tell your friend,” we said, “that if they have an opportunity to speak with anyone from one of the reliable relief agencies they should ask about the help they need.”
In once particular case a young woman was trying to help her cousin’s family, who had evacuated to a rural area outside Port-au-Prince. They were equidistant between two mid-size towns. Looking at the WFP map it was clear that one town had many more agencies working there than in the other, so we advised her to have her cousin go to the first town. It wasn’t much, but we felt we’d helped direct the cousin’s family to the place where they were more likely to find help. Travel was difficult and possibly dangerous; we’d saved them wasted time and effort.
Of course it’s not enough. The problems in Haiti were tremendous even before the earthquake, the result of decades of poverty and poor governance, inadequate building standards, overcrowding, and years of natural disaster (most often hurricanes and tropical storms) that seem to tear down improvements as soon as they are made. Progress has been too little, too slow, too disorganized. In particular the rebuilding of homes is far behind what it needs to be. There are some legitimate reasons for this (the enormous amount of rubble to be cleared and the difficulty in determining who owns some of the land), but the pace still needs to pick up in order to meet basic human needs.
One of the good things I’ve seen is that disaster relief has not had to rely on the major media; people with simple ICT tools are combining their effort to identify needs and provide aid. Another is the Haitian people’s use of simple text and voice communication to navigate the chaos of the past year.
On the subject of Haiti’s recovery from the devastation of last year’s earthquake, I will leave you with the trailer to what looks like a fascinating film. Please feel free to share any thoughts or links to informative media in the comments below.
