Social Media Revolution?
# The recent riots in London have drawn a fair bit of negative attention to the role social media have played in their co-ordination.
# We have started to see patterns of rhetoric that position 'social media' and 'riots' alongside each other. For instance,
Prime Minister David Cameron even suggested blocking the offending technologies to ease the riots...
#But what about looking at the use of social media in the context of different types of civil unrest? Why don't we take a step back from the London riots and take a look that the events in Cairo, January, 2011.
# I was curious to find out more about what went down in the Egyptian capital this year, because all I really knew was that there had been some pretty epic protests and a temporary ban by the government on social media sites.
#What I discovered was both inspiring and shocking. When I think of facebook and twitter I think about identity, networking, parties and maybe some profile checking-outage. When I think of social networking’s role alongside the London riots, I can see its immense ability to organise people (as G. Crovitz has pointed out in his article this year in the Wall Street Journal… ‘Egypt's Revolution by Social media’ http://www.aucegypt.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/WSJ.pdf )- whether they were organised to loot premises on masse, or organised to clean up the mess (en masse) as Brianna has pointed to in her earlier blog.
# What I had not really considered, was the capacity of social networking mediums to represent something else to people- something that ran potentially much deeper-the capacity to create change for the better.
2 comments:
This is really interesting! I knew that facebook was involved in what was later deemed a revolution, but I had no idea about all the details.
I think this will be a really interesting point we can focus on through our web feature- how social media is used as a tool- but for very different reasons, and in particular compare the revolution in Egypt to the London Riots- how those involved used social media for very different reasons, and also how the media framed social medias role very differently depending on where the media was being produced and who was producing it.
Post a Comment