Twitter was the tool I was most excited and nervous about teaching in Ukraine. On the one hand, I think Twitter has a number of uses that make it a powerful tool for research, communication, and broadcast that are rather distinct in the Web world. On the other hand, it’s not something widely used in Ukraine, nor are these powerful uses immediately apparent from Twitter’s front page—the result is that Twitter may seem too simple to provide many complex uses. In other words, it can appear to the beginner to be a gimmick, something fun at first, but ephemeral. I was excited to teach Twitter precisely because I think it is powerful, and that few in Ukraine were using it at all, let alone to its potential. But that is also why I was nervous—the hardest thing about Web 2.0 technology is behavior change.
There were some things about Twitter in the Ukrainian context that I was particularly concerned would stand in the way. First and foremost, united among all of the Web 2.0 tools we were teaching, was this idea of freely spreading information to the world, letting go of control over it, thinking “What will be useful to someone else?” In my past experience in Ukraine, I have found that information is not something you just give away for free. In the Soviet Union, information was the real currency. It didn’t matter how much money you had, because there was little on the shelves to buy. You had to know someone with the goods on the black market. That information was the real commodity in the Soviet Union.
Now, fast forward to the generation following the Soviet Union, a generation upon which we are still on the cusp. There are still feelings that information is not something you just throw around for all to benefit from at no direct cost. Not everyone feels this way, but it’s still an issue. How weird the idea must be to suddenly be told you should regularly send Tweets with your daily pearls of wisdom, useful online articles you found, your feelings and reactions to a public event. This last one is especially pertinent—for many in Ukraine, what you think about things are still very much reserved for private spheres. Imagine how vulnerable one might feel at the thought of saying to him or herself, “I’m going to Tweet this information so ANYONE can see it, and not just the people in my immediate circle of trust”.
This approach to information, in my travels in Ukraine, has often presented a real challenge to NGOs there. Those I haveencountered tend to see information as theirs, and not something that should be available for all who can benefit from it, especially competing NGOs. NGOs in Ukraine can be VERY competitive for funding and resources. It was not rare, in the past, for me to encounter NGOs that would rather keep information that, if free, could have been very helpful to the public, in the name of maintaining their comparative advantage. It’s the mindset that if you have something that others don’t, but that others want, they will need you. Once they have what you have, it can threaten your existence as an organization. Never mind that your whole purpose as an organization is to help the public as much as possible, and to build your programs around the idea that, hopefully, you will one day no longer be needed. This is very complicated in Ukraine. And an American that comes in slinging around Twitter and encouragement for you to be free with all of your best information can easily be met with skepticism and suspicion. Read the rest of this entry ?
Normally, I focus more on promoting things done well rather than rail against things done poorly. But, I gotta say, there’s room for exception in some cases. Enter: LiveJournal. I’m sorry, but I kinda think the world would be a better place without LiveJournal, given the available alternatives.
