Not So Socialist Media

We are living in trying timesl

In the time since I blogged here last a nefarious little invention called Twitter has taken the world by storm and been blamed partially at least for the downfall or two North African strongmen, Kenyans butchered each other to near nothingness, Google have achieved near world domination in a near impossible field if you have asked me at the time -mobile -through an equally nefarious (depending on who you ask -refer to RMS here) invention called Android and the term apps has become part of everyday parlance and the term innovation is thrown around a bit too much for my liking. Today mentioning dates in the fashion of January 21st and May 15th is a treasonable offence in some country thanks largely to the aforementioned nefarious invention, Twitter.

It is the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven and it seems technology is inescapable. I have an app on my Droid that predicts my girlfriend's menstrual cycle another to walk me through her pregnancy, one that makes fart noises, an app that allows me to play guitar and another that, case in point, allows me to blog. In other words my Droid is my life.

Locally thanks largely to the success in university and college campuses anyway of the Huawei Android phone from local smartphones are almost ubiquitous an eventuality that would have been extremely unlikely in my thinking two years ago.

Today Twitter is used to shape opinions not only around the world but even on my campus where there is currently a bounty on the first twit pic of the principal’s secretary’s rear. Today, I am more likely to catch breaking news on Twitter and Identica than on radio as was the custom. With my Al Jazeera app I can easily watch a full length documentary on my mobile phone.

But some things have not changed.

Much of software land is still in the hands of evil capitalist pigs. But there is hope. Upstarts such as status.net are working to wrench social media and its increasingly important social and economic ramifications from the death grip of proprietariness. Another project Diaspora seeks to make amends for Facebook's many sins. Facebook if you are not aware has grown to have the population of a large country.

Twitter which two years ago was an upstart few knew about (that was before Oprah Winfrey joined) has achieved fame and status the world over. But Twitter, who turned five the other day, are still struggling to turn over a buck.

Recent moves by the vendor to curtail their own developers, largely to thank for their huge following are worrisome.

Twitter’s strategy of killing off rival clients so as to make money is rather simplistic and short sighted.

There is need to think of Social Media outside of the myopic context of money and financial greed. Social Media, I put to you, has a far greater role and potential as an agent for social change and empowerment. As proven in the last couple of months social media and mobile can be used as a tools to organize protests, topple repressive regimes, to spread information to counter state sponsored misinformation and help families and communities get in touch in the event of calamities and disasters. Things that we cannot put a price on.

It has also become apparent that if communication services such as Twitter are left to a single vendor they can easily be censored off national Internets, as was the case in Egypt and more recently Libya. The underlying technology for such services needs to be widespread and in the hands of various vendors such that a single DoS attack will not jeopardize the communications of users. Federated models such as the one promoted by Status Net and project Diaspora are welcome steps in the right direction here.

Do you not think it is time we harnessed the social dividend of social media.

Social media is still largely controlled by large corporations in the west. Despite attempts to incorporate new ways such as text to encourage inclusion in social media, much of Africa is still in the dark as far as social media is concerned.

The events of the last couple of months have proven that the consumers of social media care deeply about subjects such as social welfare and justice. I put it that social media channels such as twitter have become such important means of communication that it would be wrong to leave them in the hands of a few in the west.

And oh, did I mention that nobody blogs anymore choosing instead to Tweet or Facebook on their mobile phones.

The blog is dead a friend on Identica noted the other day. And by dead he meant it no longer attracted the interest of drive by technoratti.

Technology it seems, nowadays, is more hype than aiding human development. Sadly, that has not changed in the last two years.


You can follow the author on twitter at twitter.com/nj3ma or on identi.ca/nj3ma

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