Social media Archives - Will Richardson

Aimee Corrigan:

In a country with 130 million mobile-phone users and active social networks, social media and mobile technology played a central role in Nigeria’s Ebola containment. SMS platforms were used to share information on the signs and symptoms of the virus. Ebola Alert, a technology organization formed by group of volunteer doctors, used Facebook and Twitter to increase awareness through 24/7 updates and online Ebola chats. Social media campaigns deployed Nollywood stars to sensitize audiences, manage fear and myths, and reduce stigma. Contract tracers were equipped GPS technology on mobile devices to ensure accountability and accuracy during interviews and monitoring. Health workers were provided with mobile phones and an Android app that allowed for immediate and critical information sharing. Each of these strategies led to fast communication, better self-reporting and identification of Ebola contacts, successful tracking and monitoring – all essential components of an outbreak response that Nigeria got right in record time. What can we learn from Nigeria? And how can these strategies be utilized in public health challenges in Africa and beyond?

Social media and technologies, when used well, can have a hugely positive impact on the world. We should be sharing more of these types of stories…and problem sets…with our students. Any guesses as to what solutions to future crises they will have to create?

Bonnie Stewart:

Twitter is, as my research continues to show, a path to voice. At the same time, Twitter is also a free soapbox for all kinds of shitty and hateful statements that minimize or reinforce marginalization, as any woman or person of colour who’s dared to speak openly about the raw deal of power relations in society will likely attest. And calls for civility will do nothing except reinforce a respectability politics of victim-blaming within networks. This intractable contradiction is where we are, as a global neoliberal society: Twitter just makes it particularly painfully visible, at times.

Because there is no way to win. The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective “we” treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims. As Emily Gordon notes, musing about contemporary Twitter as a misery vaccuum, the platform brings into collision people who would probably never otherwise end up in the same public space. Ever. And that can be amazing, when there are processes by which people are scaffolded into shared contexts. Or just absolutely exhausting. We don’t know how to deal with collapsed publics, full stop. We don’t know how to talk across our differences. So participatory media becomes a cacophonic sermon of shame and judgement and calling each other out, to the point where no identity is pure enough to escape the smug and pointless carnage of petty collective reproach.

I think, too, that the speed with which these social media tools are born and die makes the creation of norms around their use even more difficult. We knew the limits of paper and pen…but Twitter?