TEDxRotterdam Talk - Main contents

                                                               Photo: Bram Muller / TEDxRotterdam

Let me introduce to you, Askar. 

It is a refugee camp in Palestine, near the place where my father grew up. 

This camp has 200 narrow streets. But it is also the place of the world’s first street named after a Twitter-account. My Twitter-account. I bought this streetname for 100 euro from a Dutch website. 

The money was well spent. It helps the renovation of a youth centre in the camp.

And it gave me around 300 thousand followers on Twitter.

As soon as I uploaded this picture and tweeted about it, major blogs picked it up, followed by an immense stream of tweets.

CNN took notice.

But also the cofounders of Twitter. They placed me between @BarackObama and @Coldplay on their suggested users list. But more importantly, what it also did, was making a huge number of people aware of the fact that in a refugee camp, streets have no names.

In warzones and fragile states, where media do not function well, where journalists are barred or silenced, social media have become an important tool. With the rise of new mobile technologies in Africa and the Middle East, social media, have offered ordinary people the permission to narrate their own stories, without governmental or editorial filters.

We have seen the use of Facebook during labor strikes in Egypt and the role of Twitter during protests in Iran. As demonstrators took the streets, social networks seeped out a diversity of stories and narratives.

The best way politicians can promote this development is to support the direction that social media are already taking, and not counter it through ineffectual means like bans or filters.

But there is another side to it.

We are surprised by the protests in Iran, like we were surprised by the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid in South Africa. We were surprised because we weren’t aware that under the surface people were thinking differently, who were beginning to organize and were ready when the moment came.

To effectively assist and protect ordinary men and women, we need to learn how to listen to social media.

The voices you hear and the faces you see on your television screens, the militiamen and political leaders do not form the majority in Afghanistan. Neither do pirates in Somalia.

What we hardly see are huge numbers of ordinary people who do not subscribe to the policies of the governors or the militiamen, and who are, in fact, quiet dissidents. People like you and me.

If we listen to social media, for a prolonged period, we would find not only pirates but also ordinary Somali’s struggling on a daily basis to survive in one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, not only Taliban-fighters or international troops and their policymakers in Afghanistan, but ordinary Afghans who want to have their kids going to school.

With the growth of social media, instead of looking at those with the loudest voices, we would be looking at the driving factor of history, the daily life of ordinary people.

The residents living in nameless streets.

As the use of social media eventually grows in fragile states there is a need to look under the surface.

Politicians need to find their way to clouds of local voices. They need to follow them, as it offers them a safeguard.

But local voices need help to be found. Politicians won’t be able to follow thousands of people for prolonged periods of time. But local experts are able to do so.

Here is also a fundamental new role of reporters, journalists and other traditional media. They would need to become the road signs to local voices, to the Joes and Janes in Afghanistan and Somalia, who need to be listened to more carefully and for a long period.

Like it or not, ordinary people have more than ever before the permission to narrate, Somethink completely different is to start to listen to them.