Further to the Web 2.0 element of Sunday’s special op in Abbottabad, the guy who live-tweeted what he saw in the sky that night has emerged as a real figure of interest to me.
Sohaib Athar is intelligent, he’s got a good sense of humor and he’s funny. (The latter two are not the same thing. You can be funny without a sense of humor, and you can have a sense of humor without being able to lob a quip. He’s both.) When he found out the significance of the events he’d been observing, he tweeted, “Uh, oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”
He also doesn’t seem to be getting a swelled head at all the world’s media besieging him for interviews. He says he doesn’t own a TV, and tweeted, “Sorry three-lettered-big-tv-news-channels for not replying to your emails.”
He did speak to a couple, including one three-lettered-big-TV-news-channel. And, unlike anyone I’ve seen in the blogosphere, he does not intend to leverage his fame to gain a fortune. When CNN asked what he planned to do now that he has thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook, he said, “I don’t exactly plan to do anything. I am where I am and if they want to follow me and listen about what I have to say, then I can probably use it to create a more positive image for my country, but besides that, I don't really want to monetize it or anything."
He says he’s just a guy who moved with his family to a city he thought would be safer than Lahore, because he didn’t want to have to explain suicide bombers to his small son.
(Reminds me a bit of Wilmer McLean, a farmer in Manassas who moved south when Union and Confederate armies fought the first major battle of the War Between the States in July 1861. He settled in Appomattox Court House, where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac converged in April 1865. His house was where R.E. Lee surrendered to U.S. Grant.)
But I think my favorite statement by Athar is this: “I am JUST a tweeter, awake at the time of the crash. Not many Twitter users in Abbottabad, these guys are more into Facebook. That's all.”
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