People often look for "Twitter revolutions" -- or debunk them -- in major events like a demonstration of 100,000 people on the main public square when elections are contested.
But the actual Twitter revolutions often shows up in small places or in the interstices of large events that don't even seem to be about revolutions per se, or even self-consciously, social media itself. And I suppose that's when you know social media is really "changing the world". But...is it?
Eleven years ago, during the OSCE summit in Ankara, of course, we didn't have Twitter. We had email and faxes, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous. I recall getting only a few emails or faxes back then from Ankara (I didn't go, although I worked on various issues leading up to the summit, I had colleagues who attended). People didn't have email back on their cell phones then even if they had a cell phone (and they were far less prevelant), and it would have been difficult to find an Internet cafe to send email -- it wasn't necessarily standard in 1999. I don't recall having Internet so readily available even at home in the 1990s -- it was in the 2000s, although of course we had it at work.
Now, the OSCE summit in Astana is casually being tweeted by various people, young people who are either low-level staff or reporters or NGOs, tweeting largely funny, social, superficial things. President Medvedev had only one tweet to say he arrived in Astana -- the Twitter feed doesn't seem to have any heads of state commenting.
A Kazakh woman who describes herself as "giggly" and is quite astute at times describes the different colour ties of the various heads of state -- but also works in comments about how the parallel conference seemed to be very selective as to its invited participants and seemed to be "a bunch of people from mail.ru who make bucks from grants on hot topics and are active on social media".
I found myself having to tweet to one of those earnest @parOSCE boosters that you know? Civil society is *not* just NGOs, and not just NGOs who go to international conferences. You almost think it would be startling not only for the heads of state, but for these professional civil-society-c'est-mois sorts to see actual civil society in its more pluralistic manifestations -- local grassroots environmentalists not organized into grant-taking entities, priests and imams, parent and teacher groups, labour unions (one never hears of them at OSCE, ever!), even businesses.
Hillary's speech at a town hall (fortunately not related to the parallell summit but separate) seemed to impress -- her call for media freedom and mentioning of jailed journalists.
A man expresses surprise that Lavrov and Otunbayeva both have their head phones off to listen to Ban Ki Moon because they both know English -- "Respekt" he tweets.
Another young Kazakh fellow tweets that some of the delegates are *sleeping* during his president's speech! Imagine that! And he isn't jailed for reporting this, of course.
The same guy tweets that judging from the faces of some of the delegates sitting in the meeting, "they could give a fuck," he writes (in Russian).
It's always interesting to me to see how Russian is tweeted -- for example, instead of writing out "kakoi-nibud'" they write "k-nit'" or even "kin'". If typing with Latin letters (the type of phone they have?) they use a "4" for the "ch" sound.
Several expressed unhappiness that Central Asian leaders were speaking in Russian, and of course, President Nazarbayev is chairing the meeting in Russian. One twitterer applauded the OSCE General Secretary Marc Perrin de Brichambaut for at least adding some Kazakh words at the end of his speech.
Native language concerns, the colour of ties, the expressions on faces -- and the fact that both Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel were "looking good" -- these are the concerns that these young people on cell phones or i-pads with access to Twitter are tweeting from this world summit about august matters of state and somber topics like the war in Afghanistan.
Perhaps it's an accomplishment of Helsinki itself that they are embodying its principles of free speech and "knowing and acting on one's rights" almost unconsciously, rather than reporting the sort of thing that people used to try to smuggle out of labour camps to get into the OSCE meetings.
One woman noted that her efforts to tweet from a Kazakh ISP seemed to be blocked and she wondered if it was deliberate and wrote, essentially, "I won't be tweeting anything bad." [She tells me that she meant something different -- although it wasn't clear -- that "tweeting isn't so bad," i.e. let me tweet, it wasn't about the content but the form apparently.]
It's hard to reproduce twitter snippets, streams, convos -- follow me at @catfitz or use the hash tags #OSCE2010 or just #OSCE to see the stream of tweets I'm referencing here, or check out #parOSCE for the (already past) discussion of the parallel conference.
"A good thing about the OSCE2010 is that noow the world will know that we don't live in yurts and ride on camels," one young man wrote.
You can see the Russian-language livestream here on kiwi, a Kazakh TV station [um, yeah, just because something has TV cameras and broadcasts a summit live to the Internet doesn't mean it is an actual TV station, it's a...an....Internet broadcast thingy. This shorthand caused several regional hands like @musya to become indignant at my "many incorrectnesses".]
Moving on the fast lane with the Twitters, where people basically write what they want (it's not even so much self-censorship that they don't try to write more about human rights and democracy problems, but simply a different modern culture and outlook), it comes almost as a shock to go look at the Soviet-style newspaper put out for the conference that reminds me of the sort of Soviet tabloid that used to be put around foreign hotels or available on your flight to Moscow.
The Astana Times has anodyne pieces about the conference itself, and for 10 days now, has hugged the picture of Nazarbayev meeting Obama (but not at the OSCE in Astana, at the Lisbon summit) lol. Although Astana Times should be putting up fresh photos of their beloved leader, the temptation is just too great to keep showing Obama with the radiant Kazakh prez.
Other articles let us know that a labour problem is -- of course -- being solved. And...this just in. Seems it may not be a bad idea to raise camels in Siberia, after all.
UPDATE: Meh, everybody's a critic, especially if they are a barcamper (oh, that reminds me, I have to find my notes about all the barcamp ideologies and how rigid they are and write that up, it's a cult, like TED).
But hey, this was just a light blog trying to give a little flavour in English of what the Russian Twitter stream was like out of Astana. So I was corrected that kiwi "is not a TV station" (it's an Internet broadcast thing, and of course, it's not easy to make a TV station in Kazakhstan, as I should know, having worked on these very issues probably when some of these people were still sitting with their crayon boxes).
I was also told that in fact there wasn't concern about the tweets being blocked by the Kazakh ISP provider (although it's been confirmed that a number of web sites ARE blocked in Kazakhstan so it's definitely a valid concern) but it was more like "hey, this isn't working, let me tweet, tweeting isn't so bad" i.e. not "I'm not going to tweet anything bad". But...as always with twitter, 140 characters, especially 140 characters in shorthand Russian, isn't always going to be clear.
BTW, @musya, there is nothing so self-important as self-imported translators of Russian tweets into English during historical events. I know, because I myself have felt myself to be Terribly Important to the Metaverse when I translated Russian-language tweets during, say, the atrocities in southern Kyrgyzstan. Yes, we must all make do with such burdens on the Internet as People With a Sense of Mission, present company included, it comes with the territory.
I don't see any other things to correct, but there's the comments below. Basically, I think what a few readers resented was the portrayal of Kazakh NGOs as superficial and writing about ties and lunches and facepalms instead of, oh, I dunno, torture in their prisons, the case of Zhovtis and others, the Uzbeks being extradited, and other more somber things. The reality is, all of these grim things have been said and re-said many times in the course of the three review meetings. At the actual summit, if you aren't there, it's good to get a flavour of it from those who are there, which will be made up of small tidbits, like the fact that the facial expressions of some of the delegates there broadcast the "I could give a fuck" message.
But, it is what it is. Bored NGO staffers watching the summit on a video feed in the Pyramid write somewhat glib or funny tweets. Understood. They may have already done their serious messaging elsewhere and they have other venues for it.
I do take exception, however, with the notion conveyed that you can't express serious thoughts on Twitter, or that it is not a medium for that. Of course you can. There are many people who do put very serious news accounts and thoughts on Twitter, fitting into the one line, or running a bunch of lines. It's ok.
I'm interested in hearing more about the NGOs who aren't GONGOs in Kazakhstan and who maybe didn't get into the restricted parallel summit, and what they think of the OSCE process and issues, so I'll be looking for that.
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