I agree entirely that an English-only analysis of #pman tweets would be a disaster. Part of the next steps in any research on the data set – getting beyond the quantitative to the qualitative – involves working closely with Moldovan partners. Fortunately, several folks have offered their help in working through that data.

I totally agree with you about this. There’s a technologists’ fetish now lately with Africa, instigated primarily by high-profile figures like Jeffrey Sachs, that all you need to do is plunk down *things* or “technological solutions” like “X number malaria nets with DDT” or “one laptop per child” and you will have solved lots of problems. But of course this is totally simplistic and completely patronizing in ways we haven’t patronized developing countries since the days of missionaries! It’s merely a new kind of missionary zeal.

There’s the problem first of all that if this Twittering aplusk takes his 10,000 nets — who will deliver them? How? What is the capacity to absorb this sudden largess from the Twittering masses? The infrastructure may be overloaded. All best practices from humanitarian groups and the UN indicate that you never flood a humanitarian zone with *stuff* that might be hard to deliver or secure or will get stolen or broken when you have no *capacity* for really getting it to people. Money is always a better thing to be sending, and using local resources and supporting locals in business or in the marketplace to respond to a disaster is always better.

I agree that not only water programs are needed but another key thing: medical personnel, and their salaries. I’d rather the Twitterers pay money into a group like MSF or UNICEF who have the expertise to deliver help skilfully in the way it is needed.

It’s curious, in this “let’s debunk Twitter” article, you didn’t mention #amazonfail even once. That really surprises me. #amazonfail is an example of Twitter gone absolutely rabidly wild. It is really handily debunked by sources you should respect like Wired and Techcrunch. There really was no plot to block gay books on amazon. Yet perhaps you are ambivalent about talking about this as a #twitterfail because it is a progressive cause, that used twitter to do something progressive, and if it messed up as badly as you say Moldova messed up, then that must say something is wrong with progressive movements, eh?

See, that’s the dynamic you are setting up. Twitter is bad when used by anti-communist movements who are terribly discredited (so you say) but anybody else using them for progressive causes is ok even when they mess up! Surely you don’t mean to imply that!

Your exegesis of #pman here suffers from one very gigantic problem: you are examining only the English language tweets. There are numerous #pman’s in Romanian, as there are blogs, Facebook posts, and emails — I don’t read Romanian, but that simply has to be part of the study so I hope you will find a way to factor that in.

I don’t see at all that if #pman contains some misinformation or deliberate disinformation on it that it would discredit this movement. All social movements are uneven and turbulent and filled with chaos, and all kinds of things happen in them, with manipulations all around. I don’t think it takes away from the basic narrative here: young people used Twitter and other social media tools to oppose a communist-rigged election.

Well, Ethan, now you have company, from the American Enterprise Instituite:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/20/AR2009042002817.html

Just yesterday, I was giving a talk at Columbia Business School on a meeting about User-Generated Content and decided to bring up the example of the Facebook/low grades phenomenon. I should put up a blog post about that like you wrote this down so that it could be documented. Too many fleeting moments in all this and too easy to forget drawing lessons from them…