Sweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant
Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.
According to psfk, “The campaign was conceived by the Stockholm agency Volontaire for the tourism group Visit Sweden and then green lit by the government.”
The idea seems to be that normal Swedes will do a better job at representing their country to the outside world (the tweets are in English… or variants thereof) than either their government or an advertising campaign.
However, the “curation” is hardly random. Upcoming participants include a teacher, a priest and a lady truck driver. No doubt an attempt is being made to show a wide-spectrum picture of the country. (Most Swedes are neither Bosnian nor non-traditional laborers.)
So it might be more accurate to say the experiment is to use social media to present a picture of Sweden at its best and most diverse. There’s nothing wrong with that – social media allows us to present a picture of ourselves of our own choosing. It has the immediacy of voice, but that doesn’t mean it has unmediated authenticity.
Still, the dude is tweeting about moose hunting. That strikes me as full-bore whole-cloth Swedish weirdness. So, mission accomplished.
