Oxfam America Blog

During my first year in book publishing, I would often balk at parties when people asked, “What do you do? Are you an editor?” I had to begin by explaining that working with authors and booksellers to bring a book to market was the other half of the profession, but I did not like casting myself as a marketer because their inevitable response would be a smug, quasi-judgmental “ah.” Very quickly, I made peace with the fact that because my work involved selling books and ideas−not soap or violent video games−there was inherent meaning in what I did.

Now, I work as a press officer for branding at Oxfam America, where, given our mission, marketing is still sometimes a dirty word. Which brings me to Nick Kristof’s assertion in a recent column: that toothpaste sellers do a better job of peddling their wares than non-profits do, even in situations of urgent need.

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So I’ve finally taken the plunge: I joined Twitter.

People join Twitter every day, of course, but for me the decision had a special significance. Back in April I blogged about the risks of Twitter and what those could mean for Oxfam; my post generated lots of responses, both online and in person.

Oxfam America has had our own Twitter feed for a while now, and it’s definitely helped us get the word out. (Ironically enough, a few readers mentioned that Twitter was actually where they found my blog post.) But I had, and still have, some real reservations about it. As a writer, I worry about the erosion of language and all its power and nuance. As a communicator for social justice, I fear the abbreviated form could also mean the end of in-depth storytelling as we know it. So in some ways, joining Twitter–even though I did so for personal, not Oxfam-related, reasons–felt like a surrender.

However, I admit that I might possibly, just maybe, could have overreacted.

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Community radio operators in the studio in Mangalamapatti, India. Photo: Atul Loke / Panos for Oxfam America

Few verbal chasms loom as large as the one between “us” and “them.” Between these words stretches a negative space, full of unspoken meanings. As long as there is an “us” and “them,” there will always be an “other.”

So how do we close the distance?

As a writer here at Oxfam, I’m sort of stuck between two worlds. My job is to get people in the US to care about–to fight for–people they may never have met, with whom they may have little in common on the surface. I don’t know what it’s like to be an alpaca herder living at 16,000 feet up in Peru, or a struggling rice farmer in Senegal. But by meeting these people and documenting their stories, we writers try to cross the chasm between the people on the ground and our audience. Our goal is to turn the “us” and “them” into a shared story of human experience.

But sometimes words fall short: they’re ambiguous, after all, and weighted with readers’ own perceptions.

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