The First Global Twitter Conference on Mahatma Gandhi was held on his 144th birthday today. Organized by none other than Sam Pitroda Today ( 2nd Oct) at 7 PM IST via Twitter Handle @pitrodasam and Hash Tag: #Gandhi . The Twitter conference garnered more than 7000 tweets from across 94 countries. The aim was to discuss the life and message of Gandhiji among the twitteratti.
When asked wether today’s computerisation any relevance to Gandhiji’s thoughts, Nirupama Rao ( @NMenonRao ) pitched in saying Gandhiji saw technology as a tool of empowerment. The electronic mouse is truly a “vahana”.
Sam Pitroda has been very active using twitter. This is not the first Twitter conference he has held. Last year in september he had conducted a twitter conference on “Democratisation of Information”. It was touted as the first ever press conference on twitter.
Despite of having the limitations of wordage (just 140 character), Twitter seems to be emerging out as the most powerful medium of politicians, industrialists and think-tanks to express their views of various issues, especially on policy matters.
Pitroda’s example of using the micro-blogging platform for holding a press conference may well set an example of how to using such platforms for holding virtual press conferences going forward.
The Prime Minister had recently launched a Gandhi Heritage Portal and it is now available at www.gandhiheritageportal.org. The Portal developed by the Sabarmati Ashram under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India hosts Gandhiji’s Autobiography in 22 languages. It also has placed the ‘Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi’ in three languages: English 100 volumes, Hindi 97 volumes and Gujarati 82 volumes. In all, the Portal presents more than 5 lakh pages, 21 films, 72 audio speeches of Gandhiji and over a 1000 photographs.
Despite this effort to spread the message of Gandhi twitteratti were busy tweeting about #GandhijiKaChashma as it was trending worldwide. Gandhiji was a social innovator. In todays socially connected world would Gandhiji have used twitter. The Gandhi Heritage portal has the answer.
#Gandhi would have used Twitter as well he used telegram and other media at that time
— GandhiHeritagePortal (@GandhiPortal) October 2, 2013
Read through the happenings of the Twitter Conference as it evolved in this Storify embed below.
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