Social Media and Social Change
I think it is reasonable to say that social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have completely changed the way we communicate. Most of us use these platforms to entertain ourselves with funny pictures and videos or stay in touch with friends with instant messages or status updates. But do any of us ever stop to marvel at the power of them? Think about the potential these platforms have as communication tools rather than toys. Social media has been changing our world and it seems to me that hardly anyone has been noticing. For people across the world however, who have been oppressed, tyrannized and denied a voice, these tools have sparked a revolution and have become opportunities to speak.
Over the past year numerous reports have surfaced revealing social media as the driving force behind social change. First we saw it in Tunisia, then in Egypt, and even in Libya. Personally, I think we can now affirm it as a trend that is spreading across the Middle East and Northern Africa: social media empowering people to fight for social change.
My theory comes with the news of yet another social movement of this same likeness. Led by Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi civil rights activist, the movement has been gaining strength with a series of You Tube videos and a Facebook campaign, Teach Me to Drive So I Can Protect Myself. As I see it, the campaign has the countenance of a flash mob as it made a call for women all across Saudi Arabia to go out and drive this past Friday, June 17th. It’s not militaristic but actually rather passive and is one of the first times we have seen social networking give power to those fighting for a civil right, (instead of widespread social or political change) revealing a new extension of the possibilities social networking sites hold as societal equalizers.
It seems in the liberated world communication capabilities are seen as a fact of life rather than a freedom. We are constantly tapped into cyberspace, able to call a friend or co-worker on a whim from any location, or to share pictures or thoughts with our entire social circle in a matter of seconds. But for people like the women of Saudi Arabia the power to communicate a simple message in a fight for civil rights is an enormous luxury.
I’d like to know if Mark Zuckerberg ever held any notions that his creation would ever become so powerful as to initiate social and civil change. These women, and their counterparts across the Middle East and Northern Africa, have taken an instrument with seemingly juvenile and insubstantial intentions and innovated it in a way that can, and in my opinion, will have enormous ramifications on our societal landscape.
It seems unlikely to me that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the great social and political equalizers that our world has been waiting for, but image the opportunities they could be prefacing. No one could have forecasted the domination of the mp3 or the power of the smartphone; they were unimaginable until they were reality, leaving me to believe that we cannot speculate, but will simply have to be patient until we see how this trend plays out.