Should Obama Loan the Peace Prize to Twitter?

In a big surprise to everyone inside the U.S., the Nobel committee awarded the annual Peace Prize to President Obama, which I have commented on elsewhere.  Already, news commentators across the spectrum are skewing the decision as everything from political brown-nosing to a little case of the crazies.

But let’s pretend that in a fantasy world, the winner of the Peace Prize could loan it to someone they felt was additionally worthy.  Since the Obama win was silly enough…why not write a post about how it should have done to Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter??

I’m a big user of Twitter, and so is Jack.  And what he did a few years back really did change how the world communicates.  In a recent issue of Washington Life magazine, I wrote about how Twitter played an integral role in information about the aftermath of the Iranian elections getting to CNN and other international news services.  But even before that, Twitter played  diverse critical communications roles in earlier crisis situations like Mumbai, Madagascar, Gaza, and Pakistan, which was something I earlier studied for the Defense Department.

Spin this: President Obama was 11 days into his presidency when nominations closed on February 1st for the Peace Prize.  What exactly was he nominated for?  People, including me, make fun of Twitter’s lack of reliability and other quirks all the time, but at least they’ve had impact.

I like President Obama, and I suppose that on some level I’m proud that the U.S. President won the Nobel Peace Prize.  But I don’t think I’m going to go to parties at the Swedish Embassy for a while.  In the meantime, I’m sure Kanye West plans to disrupt Obama ’s Nobel ceremony, saying that the award should have gone to Beyonce.

Well, Kanye doesn’t like Twitter much either…so why doesn’t the White House loan the Peace Prize to Jack Dorsey for a while?  He can’t keep the million-plus dollar award that Barack Obama will get, but at least we can bask in the symbol of American innovation and creativity impacting the world for a week or two.