Social Media: Pulse of the Planet?
In 2010, Hillary Clinton described social media as a new nervous system for our planet (1). So can the pulse of the planet be captured with social media? There are many who are skeptical not least because of the digital divide. “You mean the pulse of the Data Have’s? The pulse of the affluent?” These rhetorical questions are perfectly justified, which is why social media alone should not be the sole source of information that feeds into decision-making for policy purposes. But millions are joining the social media ecosystem everyday. So the selection bias is not increasing but decreasing. We may not be able to capture the pulse of the planet comprehensively and at a very high resolution yet, but the pulse of the majority world is certainly growing louder by the day.
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Phi Beta Iota: As Dr. Meier's notes, right now only the “haves” can be thinking about this. However, we remain certain that a project such as The Virgin Truth, or a concerted effort by the Secretary General of the United Nations to inspire a global United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN), or an initiative by Secretary of State John Kerry to create the Open Source Agency (OSA), can change the information dynamics and information ethics of the Earth virtually overnight.
