Tweeting the Terror

Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai - CNN.com

Rough title, there. Yikes. Even I wouldn't (probably) title something like that. The articles puts out a bunch of really good info. It makes mention of the blood donation/helpline tweets. It completely ignores #mumbai and the use of hashtags.

Still, it's an easy-to-understand "primer" of sorts on the role that services like Twitter played and are still playing. The article ends on a sour note for me, and I think that it illustrates quite plainly the distrust and confusion which surround "crowdnews." I shall reproduce the final lines here:

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

Technorati Tags: mumbai, social media, twitter

Mumbai, Terror, and Response

I've been following the mess in Mumbai for the past few hours. As usual, Hashtags represents the best and most live way to keep up-to-date: http://hashtags.org/tag/mumbai. Even though it's getting a lot of media play, I think it's important to remember the rather peculiar "ordinariness" of the day's events.

We gasped in America when the London transport system was bombed in 2005. Londoners recovered rather quickly and went about their daily lives. They had been used to periodic terrorist attacks courtesy of the Irish Republican Army. 7/7 was really nothing new to them.

The same goes for every time we hear about a seemingly random car bomb in Iraq. That is simply the way things have been. There are children growing up in that country who have never known stability. India is no exception. We blogged at the University of Denver Interfaith Student Alliance a little bit ago about India's interfaith history, and the times when the calm has been shattered by selfish, violent acts.

Does anyone even remember the bombs in New Delhi back in October? If you live in a place like India, where sporadic politio-religious violence happens fairly often, you might not. The events taking place in Mumbai today and tonight are "scaled" for us largely because of the media exposure (thank you Web 2.0), but it always amazes me what it must be like to live in a place where such things happen fairly often. I hope that both Mumbai and India can get back on track and work to make sure that attacks like this don't happen in the future.

Technorati Tags: violence, mumbai, india

The Digital Contact, pt. 1

I would say that I am a political scientist. It's not the first thing I do, nor is it the most important, but it's a big part of my life. I've been studying quite a bit about the concept of the "social contract." In its most basic terms, the social contract is a descriptive theory about why human beings choose to join together in civil society and appoint people to lead them. The idea is that before the rise of civil society/government, humans existed in a "state of nature," an amoral place wherein there was a great risk of violent death. Furthermore, in the state of nature there could be no real progression; history was not important because everything, day in and day out, was the same.

The social contract is the agreement between a people and the leader or leaders that they appoint to lead them. The social contract assumes that the people will give up a number of their rights in order to be protected and supplied by the sovereign, or leader. Political scientists have been writing about the social contract for 4oo years. Every new author has an interesting twist or a different viewpoint that furthers the dialogue and contributes to our understanding of the need for government in our modern era.

My intention is to combine extant theoretical notions of the social contract theory with modern network theory and social media to build a framework for the Next Big Step. It is an ambitious project, to be sure, but I think that it is eminently possible.

The basic idea is this: Things have gotten to the point where the traditional systems of government are no longer doing what they were created to do. The growth of communication/globalization has changed the way that people (be they citizens of whatever state) relate to one another and to their leaders. A possible example of the "new way" is Barack Obama's change.gov, which provides Web 2.0 functionality to the American government. Whatever the case, we are in a very good position to provide not only a descriptive account of what the new social contract theory will look like, but also a prescriptive account of what we ought to be doing in order to make the transition.

I will be posting periodical updates here, and when I have a whole bunch of stuff written down, I will make the GoogleDoc live, enabling all who have thoughts to weigh in and aid me in producing what will hopefully be a practical, hopeful schematic for the future of social media, governance, and the world community. Best to you all. These are exciting times.

Technorati Tags: social media, political science, politics, social contract

Trivial Pursuits?

So I teamed up with some friends of mine from the Korbel School to compete in the first ever Institute of International Education Denver WorldQuest trivia competition. It was sweet, not least of all because my team won. Actually, we tied with the IIE's own team, but they were just doing it for fun. Plus, they had three Fulbright scholars from three different continents! We won Premier memberships and a VIP happy hour. Sweet!

The questions ranged from identifying Angela Merkel to figuring out which countries DON'T border China. The last round was "World Languages." I got excited because my undergrad work was in language and linguistics and such. One of the questions asked us to identify the number of different ways of expressing the Japanese language. I knew before I saw the multiple choice that it was 4. Not only that, but I knew that they were called Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana and Romaji. We got the question right, but it left me wondering: Why on earth do I know that?

I don't speak Japanese, and probably never will (it's about 8th place in my list of languages to learn). I've always viewed the acquisition of knowledge (even the "trivial") as something like the Boy Scout motto. Be prepared. I guess I keep hoping that one day I'll bump into some eccentric millionaire who's desperately searching for someone to explain to him the importance of the Convivencia or the history of Ireland or the distance from the earth to the sun or the number of languages in Papua New Guinea or the way to make a teabag float in midair.

If I never meet that eccentric millionaire, then are all these bits of information, some a mile wide and an inch deep and some and inch wide and a mile deep, really worth learning?

Popular Sovereignty

Just finished a small write-up about the analogy between individuals and states from the Renaissance to the 18th century as well as an analysis of what this means for contemporary international relations. It's pretty messy - I may repost a cleaner final version someday.

Brauhn - Popular Sovereignty

Motrin and Such

The last day or so has featured a flurry of Motrin (yes, the pain reliever)-related activity on the Twittertubes. I was working at the library most of yesterday, so I avoided keeping up with the madness. I didn't know what was happening, and I figured that I'd savor that and wait to find out today. And so I did, by following through to Thinkjose's post about Motrin's Twitter Headache. He does an awesome job of explaining the evolution of the damn thing, and it's well worth the visit. Apparently, the hubbub was about this video:



Yeah, I agree. Pretty silly. I do like the wordart stuff, though. The entire fiasco is another example of how different things are these days. Gives me more fodder for my upcoming Magnum Opus, which will be a research project involving social media, democracy, and international relations. Gotta think big, you know.

Technorati Tags: social media, motrin, technology

Why We Can't Stand Still

My instructor in my Modern Political Theory class was discussing how political theory, like any good idea, is generally applied retrospectively to a given situation. We aren't usually able to see patterns until after the fact. Not that this makes theory worthless, of course; we gain a greater appreciation of what has happened, and we can certainly learn about possible future occurrences of that given situation.

My instructor did point out the need for theory to be as proactive as it possibly could though, by positing this thought-experiment: "What if, tomorrow, science proves that I'm actually standing on the other side of the room?" It was a ridiculous idea, but not outside the realm of possibility.

We already know that time is relative, perhaps even more so than we would like to admit. It is, as I've long held, a social construct more than an empirical thing (I still show up early to everything, though). We can, if we like, view time as everything happening all at once, since there's no feasible end or beginning point for what we call "time." Even more disturbing/inspiring is quantum mechanics, which allows us to think really, REALLY big by looking at things that are very, very small. I offer the following easy explanation of superposition theory:



By this reasoning, my instructor most certainly could have been on the other side of the room, at the exact same time that he was where we perceived him to be. Using the aforementioned notion of time as relative, he could have been inhabiting both positions at different times as well. Whew. We can't stand still because, depending how you look at it, we are everywhere at once.

I love this stuff, but you can't think deeply about it for too long or your brain will explode.

Technorati Tags: time, quantum