From Innovation to Revolution. AN ABSENCE OF EVIDENCEMalcolm Gladwell While reading Clay Shirky's "The Political Power of Social Media" (January/February 2011), I was reminded of a trip I took just over ten years ago, during the dot-com bubble.
I went to the catalog clothier Lands' End in Wisconsin, determined to write about how the rise of the Internet and e-commerce was transforming retail. What I learned was that it was not. Having a Web site, I was told, was definitely an improvement over being dependent entirely on a paper catalog and a phone bank. But it was not a life-changing event. The lesson here is that just because innovations in communications technology happen does not mean that they matter; or, to put it another way, in order for an innovation to make a real difference, it has to solve a problem that was actually a problem in the first place. MALCOLM GLADWELL is a Staff Writer for The New Yorker. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register for free to continue reading.
Soup — On Social Networking Media and Political Revolution. "Swarm Journalism" in Iran: Media and Political Revolutions. The average age of Iranians is under 25.
The Islamic revolution, dethroning the Shah and putting in his place a theocratic state with Ayatollah Khomeini at its head, took place in 1979. Thus, the average Iranian is five years younger than the revolution under which he or she has lived their entire life. It is these young people who are pushing the protest against the alleged election fraud which re-elected the President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and has been sanctified by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameni and his ruling theocratic council of Mullahs.
And the tools of these young protesters and their titular leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, for circumventing news suppression by the mullahocracy, their threatened totalitarian government, are absolutely amazing --, phones, tweets, jpgs, ISPs, TMs, the whole wonderful clutter of what we now call the "new media. " As this uprising is being witnessed around the world, it is rightly describable as disturbing, mesmerizing and ambiguous. Crowd politics: social media inspired political revolutions? - Jonathan Lea's posterous blog.
The recent events in Egypt have renewed the debate about how far social media is leading to an increase in political movements and revolutions around the world and bringing into sharp focus how the socialisation of the web is, like both the invention of the printing press and the development of the mass broadcast media before it, leading to a step change in human evolution.
Democratisation of information Control of information has sustained governments since time immemorial. In the past, authoritarian regimes could just draw a shroud around unfavourable events in their countries. It wasn’t long ago that you would need a TV station or a printing press to be heard and governments have developed, particularly authoritarian ones, by using or appropriating centralised communication in order to maintain centralised control. Network density. Social Media & the Political Revolution in Egypt in High Definition. Mer’s Bits of Bytes » Blog Archive » Revolution 2.0: Social media and political changes in Egypt and beyond.
Is Social Media the New Mouthpiece of Political Revolution? Social media has been propelled to new heights after the revolutions in the Middle East earlier this year. We have written about the #18DaysInEgypt project that aims to chronicle the Egypt Revolution through new media—including social media such as Twitter. But, how important a role does social media actually play in revolutions such as these?
Last week, we took this question to Twitter, and asked: “Do you think social media is the new mouthpiece of political revolution?” Here are two thought-provoking responses we received as well as our views. @ewanmceoin : Social media is merely a tool, we need to be careful about associating tools with causes. I couldn’t agree more. @poeticexecution : I hope it will be the new way for political interaction with the masses! Agree again. What do you think?
Social media and political revolutions: fact and fiction - Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review. OPINION contributor Looking beyond the Arab world to China—now with more than 420 million internet users—the prospects for social-media-driven political transformations are bleak.
Many journalists and democracy activists believe that without the Internet, Twitter and Facebook nothing revolutionary would have happened in Egypt or Tunisia earlier this year. A lot of people even think these technologies caused those revolts. The new technologies were of course important tools for getting people onto the streets. But social media were not an underlying cause of the protests – let alone of the civil war in Libya. The regimes in Tunisia and Egypt suffered from deep legitimation deficits for decades, experiencing periodic displays of mass protests earlier. More important, the technologies that helped mobilize masses in Egypt and Tunisia to overthrow the old regimes are ill suited to building new democratic polities.