hookers

One of my wilder ideas is this: bring mobile social networking to marginalized groups of people to help them connect more conveniently at least to one another, and ultimately to resources and people wherever they happen to be in the world. Matthew Bennett’s question in the @Israelconsulate Twitter press conference on Gaza just brought it back up for me:

We KNOW that social connections broaden horizons of opportunity. Integrating more and new connections into everyday routines using commonly available tools like mobile phones make those connections more readily available for help, support and having questions answered when and where it needed. It weaves a new fabric of interdependence, access and support.

I want to launch a project to give prostitutes and other sex workers mobile access to Twitter, and I don’t mean to improve the effectiveness of their marketing. This came to me as I sadly watched the fifth mobile billboard (girls to your room in 20 minutes!) pass while waiting to cross “the strip” in Vegas this year. I turned to my friend Howard and just blurted it out “I want to get hookers onto Twitter.”

A person with connections is a person with options. A person who is less alone. A person who has access to more ideas and support and more opportunities. A person whose talents and abilities would otherwise go underutilized – a terrible loss to all. Better networked, some who are in difficult situations would still remain in those same situations, but others would not. Others would reach outside of themselves and be reached and become more in the process. Consider HBS Professor Andrew McAfee’s reflection on 2008’s top technologies:

…echoing E.M Forster’s exhortation in Howard’s End: “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon… Live in fragments no longer.”

He concludes

“With Twitter, I’m never far from my people.”

By definition, marginalized people do not have a whole bunch of options coming their way. Could we launch actual aid projects to work with locally available infrastructure and better connect people to one another? What it we intentionally applied mobile social networking to more and different situations where otherwise disaffected people could have a voice and connect to one another?

What if children in drastically different (and in particular, warring) cultures grew up with pathways of connection and friend-of-a-friend loose ties to one another and to people both like and unlike them?

What could mobile social networking become one day for the homeless, migrant laborers, at-risk teens, sex workers, refugees…? You may laugh, but mobile phones are becoming a ubiquitous and potentially powerful tool for social change.

Twitter’s no panacea. Efforts like this have probably been attempted and are being attempted still. Even if when these networks flourish and grow, there will be those who use them negatively and harmfully.

But I know in my heart that opportunity and learning lie this way. It can be done better. We’re learning something, every day, on Twitter. We know that whenever truly mobile, short-burst, socially-networked microsharing becomes a widespread reality for isolated people, the proverbial thousand flowers blossom.

…And if nothing else was gained, when I tweeted my ideals of connection between warring cultures, all of these these inspiring examples were reflected back to me. Twitter has a lovely habit of teaching us about whatever topics we share there.

Arava Institute || GazaSderot: Life in Spite of Everything || Mideast Youth: Thinking Ahead || Olives of Peace || NYT Jerusalem Journal video about teen peace concerts || Israelis and Palestinians Launch Web Start-up || West-Eastern Divan || Seeds of Peace || Why I Wish I Was My Son

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