Technology is surely changing the way we do things - good and bad, the reason some school of thought is of the view that technology is neutral. I will not talk about technology neutrality today but rather share my views on the facebook phenomenon and how it is gradually catching up in Ghana, and why I think it is for all the right reasons.

Elsewhere, social media such as facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs are used in several ways. For example I got several twitter messages from someone on the role France played in the post election violence in Gabon. In his own small way, he was making his voice heard on developments in his country. You can also do same. Twitter, youtube and facebook played a major role in bringing the attention of the International community to developments in Iran during the elections that brought President Ahmadinejad back into office. In the particular case of Iran, even though twitter and facebook were blocked, it did not deter people from working around that to get their messages across and they did thanks to technology. So this social media phenomena has literally empowered the voiceless to speak out.

Apart from citizen journalism which is one of the many uses of social media, there are several other uses people put them to. It is a great tool for marketing and PR as well, and speaking of PR, the three Ministers of Information were recently on facebook discussing government business via facebook. They said the were trying to reach out to another constituency of Ghanaians and even though I have personal issues with that, I think they got their messages across.

Perhaps one of the most unorthodox uses I have seen people use it for is the Facebook ‘waakye‘ party I attended today. It was totally mind blowing to see several hundreds of Ghanaian youth throng Labone, a surburb of Accra to meet virtual friends, have fun and above all eat ‘Waakye’, a nutritious and delicious Ghanaian delicacy made from rice and beans. It was simply amazing the kind of people I saw there. So facebook became the enabler if I may of organising this new generation of Ghanaians, full of energy and zeal. Now, I kept wondering to myself what next to expect of social media such as these in Ghana. I just think there are countless possibilities and I just hope we can take advantage of them to empower the people more.

I understand there will be a Facebook Awards Night soon and I don’t have any ideas on what that is but I guess I can’t complain so long as people get to use the Internet more and adapt to changing trends. This is already encouraging because for the past three months I have been checking the statistics on unique Facebook accounts at Checkfacebook.com and found out that the number of facebook accounts have increased from 100,000 to 249,060 as of Friday 25th September, 2009. This means people are using the Internet more, and seriously I don’t care whether they are using mobile phones or the PC. I just dream of a day when everyone has access to some form of Internet connection. I feel I have limitless possibilities with the Internet, I hope you do too?

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