Digitale tanker fra hverdagen

When twitter opens a window into someone else’s life

Anna Ebbesen — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:29:25 +0000

I spotted this storify-article by AlJazeera about the tag #RIPAmina and the story behind it.

“#RIPAmina is gaining traction following the suicide of a young girl, Amina from Larache, Morocco. According to online reports, Amina was raped by a man 10 years her senior a year ago. Following an agreement between her family and a civil court Amina was forced to marry her rapist, which protected him from any criminal charges according to Moroccan penal code.”

Digital media do reach across borders and timezones and can give you a glimpse of someone elses life. Powerful, fascinating and this case, truly horrific.

Read the full article here.

Viral for better or for worse

Anna Ebbesen — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 22:18:00 +0000

March 7th was all about Kony2012 – A video the American organization, Invisible Children, launched to raise awareness about the cruelty of warlord Joseph Kony. March 8th was about the afterthought. Did we just get swept away?

Postscript!
In the days after I did the Storify, more great articles emerged that adds nuances to the debate:

“an excellent video response to Kony2012 from Ugandan blogger and journalist Rosebell Kagumire.” Posted by SheJustNailedIt on Tumblr.

BoingBoing reports how a Kony 2012 screening in Uganda “results in anger, rocks thrown at screen”. “One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11 – likely to be highly offensive to many Americans, however well intentioned the campaign behind it.” Powerful quote.

Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics explains in this brilliant blogpost why he thinks the campaign is wrong: “What intrigues me is how very intelligent, compassionate people respond to these criticisms by defending the campaign, despite its faults. Yes, they say, it does misrepresent and it probably is wrong-headed, but wow! Look at all that awareness being raised! Even my five year old daughter knows about Kony now! (…)This is bizarre. The means do not justify the ends. Bad means can actually make things worse.” In his post he links to other great articles worth while reading.

We are going to the awards!

Anna Ebbesen — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:13:50 +0000

It’s Oscar night 2012 on Sunday and by the looks of it, social media will be the big star, aka you + me = we will be stars!! Yay!

If you look at the other big television event this year, they have all exceeded expectations about how much people will participate and way in with thoughts and comments via Twitter and Facebook:

“The Super Bowl garnered 12.2 million comments on social networks like Twitter and Facebook during the game’s recent telecast, up 578% from last year’s game, according to Bluefin Labs. The Grammy Awards racked up 13 million social-media comments during the broadcast, up 2,280% from last year. (The show also had a surge in TV viewers, likely due in part to the death of Whitney Houston the day before the awards.)”

And the more we way in, the more the networks and the established media are trying to include that in their coverage. It’s clear: We ARE stars! We finally made it in to the big league!

Sharing the stage

The amount of voices that can speak about something have never been greater, but we aren’t winners alone – the major players are still the same: networks transmitting and staging the scene, comitiees electing and football teams playing. These power players have all found a way to capitalize on our need to speak and contribute. Especially the media seems to be in this game as crowd pleasers. You and your thoughts via social platforms, are used by them to keep you happy – they can give you the footage you want, ask the questions you asked and highlight your post to make you feel special and talk more, contribute more and costume/watch more. The way networks seems to be using social media, is like an ongoing, public focus group, constantly absorbing the data in almost realtime.

So yes, we do get a bigger say in it all, and cramp the stage we only observed before, but we are still backing those who define the stage itself. They are as much winners, as we are.

True stars?

The losers seem to be the people we are interested in (which makes the media – the pleasers – interested too): the famous people . The ones we are all talking about - we + the media. They are never alone, and are always expected to be on – online, on camera - and only off in the socially unacceptable way, never completely out of contact. Like the old Studio Stars of the golden age of Hollywood were owned by the studios, we now own the unrestricted access to the celebraties.

From the Wall Street Journal’s description of the media’s planned Oscar coverage:

“Even the after-show party-scene glamour will be socially leveraged. Vanity Fair, which famously throws an Oscar party, will have a staffer tweeting from the party, and video footage of the celebration will go online hourly throughout the party, says Chris Rovzar, Vanity Fair’s digital editor.”

Kinda ruins the feel of a backstage, no? But then again, backstages are more useful for someone’s personal branding, if all the ones who are not backstage, knows that you are. You win some, you lose some, right?

We the mainstream are coming!

I can’t help the feeling that we – us on social media getting in on the coverage of stars – are the pretty but bland mainstreamers that when they start showing up at a bar, you know it’s only a matter of time before the cool kids go somewhere else and the magic disappears.

…but can we ruin it?

Even mainstream events needs their edgy characters that fall out of place and are different, in order to get mainstream’s attention. Take Simon Cowell on American Idol – could it stay interesting season after season, year after year, if it wasn’t for our urge to get his next outrageous comment? No. It’s as much about them, as it is to see yourself get the chance to be a star that’s appealing.

I can’t help thinking: How much should we take up the spotlight and but in, before we get tired of ourselves?

Or, since it’s still a mainstream event televised to the masses: how much should the media cater and put us on the screen, before we get tired of ourselves?

#savetheintern – a small big story on the brits, social media and political communication

Anna Ebbesen — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:26:16 +0000

#savetheintern was one of the most trending topics in all of England yesterday, thanks to a foolish intern at the House of Parliament. In an 2 min state of dumb wit this young intern used the twitter account of her boss, MP Tom Watson, to tweet the following:

The fun lasted only a few more minutes until the tweet quickly became re-tweeted to fame and media attention. Maybe she thought that only he could see it or perhaps only her friends? Regardless, 15 min later, she regretted her actions:

Luckily for her, Tom Watson seems to have a sense of humor. He has replied to all the fuss his intern + twitter + the british media had created in an excellent (and very dry humored) blogpost containing:

“a bullet point list of answers to many of the questions that have been posed, as well as a few things I would like to get of my chest”.

Ironically, the young intern might have been saved by Twitter as well – the platform that got her into this mess in the first place. Because the third tweet that was posted by his account after her initial blunder, was him saying sorry, and that he will deal with the matter offline.

A reaction that fueled the #savetheintern hashtag and prompted people to call him, asking him not fire the intern, according to The Telegraph.

The logic of this story is indeed odd – from laughter and outcry to a plee to let the intern keep her job. From Tom Watsons chair it must have been frustrating to watch the whole thing spin out of control as the actions on twitter became news articles on BBC and The Telegraph and fueled several spin off conversations on interns rights, their pay etc.

Going over this story again today, Tom Watson’s blogpost truly stands out as a great response. As one twitter user describes it:

A world without wikipedia? No thanks

Anna Ebbesen — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:16:55 +0000

Today, I was reminded of how things were, before we grew accustomed to a free flow of information accessible to everyone with access to the web. And I don’t want to go back.

The campaign against SOPA and PIPA has taken different forms over the past months. The two pieces of legislation are feared by many, who claim they’ll ruin the web as we know it, and thus ruin the free flow of ideas and information. Today, Wikipedia made the boldest move yet, and subjected the English version of the crowd-sourced cyclopedia to a complete blackout. A move that echoed around the world, and even made headlines here in little Denmark.

Television’s comeback as gatekeepers

TV 2 GO'Morgen Danmark and their "GO'pedia"

As a response to the blackout, the most popular morning show in the country gathered a team of experts to answer all those questions that you weren’t able to look up on Wikipedia. (Being Danes, we could of course just use the Danish, Swedish or Norwegian version of Wikipedia, but let’s ignore that for a second). When watching the hosts convey the questions from the viewers to the experts, I was reminded of how things were like when I grew up.

What is this?

There were television quiz programs where contenders had to guess what an object was used for, and discussions at a dinner could continue on and on and on and on, until someone caved and went next door to look it up in an encyclopedia. You needed middle men to get answers, and access to them or the information itself wasn’t easy and certainly not free for all.

Hvad er det? Old Danish television show hosted by Piet Van Deurs

When I moved out as a teenager, I would call my mother with questions, when ever I was discussing a subject and couldn’t remember a detail, or friends couldn’t agree on the nature of something. I’d call her up to pick her brain, and if she couldn’t remember or didn’t know, she would look it up for me in one of our two encyclopedias. A few years later she admitted that the reason why we had two encyclopedias, was because the latest one was bought for me, so I’d be able to take this pool of knowledge with me, when I moved out. It was an economic investment that was worthwhile in her eyes; a necessity.

But when I did, the frequent calls with questions were so nice that she prolonged giving it to me. Can’t say that I blame her – I missed her insightful answers and thoughts on matters from politics to anthropology when I started looking everything up myself.

But, make no mistake, I’d rather call my mother about something I’ve found on Wikipedia, than to be stuck with television programs distributing knowledge found in books.

Wikipedia and the web replaced the action of calling others for answers with the process of creating the answers together, and transformed the printed encyclopedia from being a decisive collection of knowledge to a historical artifact; a static image about how the world was perceived once. Hopefully the conversations will also evolve from solemly being about the facts themselves to where the knowledge came from, how and with what built in assumptions?

Thank you, Go’ Morgen Danmark and the Wikimedia Foundation, for reminding me, how truly fantastic and game changing Wikipedia is, and how utterly grateful I am for all the opportunities the web gives me.