I was sitting at home sharing 2 hours of jubilation with hundreds of strangers from all over the world... thanks to
Twitter.
Odd concept really; an entire site built around answering the question: "What are you doing" in 140 characters or less. I had joined the Election 2008 group and was reading 'tweets' from people all around the world - so many different languages from so many different countries - and all sending warm wishes and congratulations to the Americans. And it was pretty damn special witnessing so many hundreds of people express their elation at the election result . . . over and over again as people awoke, logged in and yelped for joy.
Flickr is being used to gather together messages from all around the world for Barack Obama; really cool example of utilizing crowd sourcing to capture the spirit of our time - and this is history unfolding.
I was thinking about all this in relation to a long discussion I held with Deb and Pippa yesterday about the digital divide. And I got to thinking just how brilliantly the whole election experience with Twitter highlighted to me how technology is also being used to brilliantly bridge divides of geography, nationality and community - it truly was a global party! Brian Kelly blogged about this being a 'water cooler' moment and very cleverly took a screenshot before the group dissappeared (which I failed to do). Interesting too the comment from Kev Hickey on Brian's
blog:
"As I posted on Jaiku this morning “Via Twitter I can see that Lee le Fever has a street party in Seattle, Stephen Fry is grinning in Madagascar & John Cleese is tapdancing”.
Glad too that a Facebook
group has been set up to capture photographs from around the world depicting this momentous turning point in American history - thank you Jenny Levine. We posted an image of the 30minute updates we posted in Levin Library (yes America - the world cared about this election!)
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