Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009...2:20 pm
David Pogue: Can Twitter help connect people worldwide?
Can Twitter be a tool of cultural diplomacy?
That was the heady topic New York Times technology columnist David Pogue addressed Monday during a symposium at Syracuse University in Upstate New York. He was part of a panel trying to figure out how to transcend conflict through culture.
Now, the way I understood it, cultural diplomacy is just a million-dollar term for a rather simple concept: Sharing culture through the arts, music, etc., as a means to help all of us who live on this Earth to get along.
Pogue explained that Twitter could be part of this because it has the potential to cut out the traditional separations between groups of people. Regular folks can read tweets from actor Ashton Kutcher or Oprah Winfrey unfiltered by the staffers that generally separate the famed from the fans.
“That’s cool,” Pogue told the audience of several hundred people. “The beauty of Twitter is that … it levels the layers.”
Read the rest of the post at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
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I'm Gina Masullo Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is a Ph.D. candidate in mass communications. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
3 Comments
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:41 am
I think twitter can connect people world wide. There are no filters and unlike facebook and myspace the famous people, whether it be a politician or celeb, are doing the tweeting themselves. The only draw back is that the “famous people” need to connect to the regular “joe” for the circle to be complete. If that happens twitter can defiantly pull the world together in communication.
October 1st, 2009 at 11:55 am
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October 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am
“Regular folks”
Ma’am, when you separate Kutcher and Winfrey from “regular folks”, you propagate the meme that these other “regular folks” are somehow “better” than “the rest of us”.
Twitter is very democratizing, in that it cuts through those kind of road apples.
I’ll put it to you this way: the question isn’t whether or not Kutcher and Winfrey read my tweets…the question is, why should I read theirs?
I’ve made this same point about newspapers: they continue to (try to) be “gateways of information”, deciding for “us regular folks” what they will deem worthy to publish. And they don’t get it, either — that model, born of a particularly nasty example of arrogant elitism, is obsolete.
I’ve blogged about this a couple of times on tpmcafe — hope you read those posts…
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