Since early 2008, American University's Center for Social Media has been producing a series of field reports that profile innovative media for public knowledge and action. Published as part of the Center's Ford Foundation-supported Future of Public Media project (www.futureofpublicmedia.net), these case studies are designed to explore how publics form around participatory and multiplatform media projects. In this report, Nina Keim and Jessica Clark examine two linked projects related to the 2008 presidential election: Twitter Vote Report (TVR) and Inauguration Report '09 (IR09).
Smith's community isn't the only smaller city or town to find itself suffering form a lack of local press. While the New York City mayoral election attracts interest from the New York Times, elsewhere the media landscape has changed drastically, thanks to the shuttering of smaller newspapers that were traditionally the source of local political coverage. In some places, social media is being used to try and replace some of what has been lost in terms of professional reporting.
#140con: Police test Twitter strategy
Two police officers explain why it is important to engage with social media and what their plans are
"We started because we struggled to engage with young people," said Payne. "We thought Twitter, YouTube and social media, that was where they were talking. So 18 months ago we had no presence anywhere at all. But then we saw a mobile video of a murder – and none of my officers could access the social networks. In the meantime we totally unblocked the net, any officer can now go online. And let me tell you, we had tremendous success finding criminals with the help of social media."
herefore, attempts to outline their effects on political action are too often reduced to dueling anecdotes
two perspectives on the role of social media in non-permissive environments, the instrumentalist versus environmental schools of thought.
Throughout the Cold War, the United States invested in a variety of communications tools, including broadcasting the Voice of America radio station, hosting an American pavilion in Moscow [...], and smuggling Xerox machines behind the Iron Curtain to aid the underground press, or samizdat.”
protests, when effective, are the end of a long process, rather than a replacement for it.
t is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference.
llows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
one of the main forms of coordination is what the military calls ‘shared awareness,’ the ability of each member of a group to not only understand the situation at hand but also understand that everyone else does, too. Social media increase shared awareness by propagating messages through social networks.
he has to convince readers that in the absence of social media, those uprisings would not have been possible.
Do social media allow insurgents to adopt new strategies? And have those strategies ever been crucial? Here, the historical record of the last decade is unambiguous: yes, and yes.
these changes do not allow otherwise uncommitted groups to take effective political action. They do, however, allow committed groups to play by new rules.
the power of social media to synchronize the behavior of groups quickly, cheaply, and publicly, in ways that were unavailable as recently as a decade ago.
What Ethan is saying in his piece is that social media facilitated the events in ways that were crucial (material cause), but the revolution was made by the people of Tunisia at great human cost (the efficient cause) and it was aimed at overthrowing to corruption, unemployment and tyranny (the final cause).
I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact.
Social media helps strengthen communities as it is the antidote to isolating technologies (like suburbs and like televison)
For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
""The big takeaway point is you don't [reach the middle] with social media--I've yet to see any evidence that social media is going persuade truly persuadable voters,""
"We will use social media and the latest technology available to fuel the energy and commitment of folks on the ground, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, all around the country," said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama's re-election campaign
"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
"The Facebook-sparked protest and 4 February demonstrations in Colombia make an interesting test-case of the burgeoning power of unorthodox media outlets and their potential to rally great numbers of people in a short period of time. The initial spontaneity and synergy are a paradigm example of how technology can spawn transnational political forms; in this the phenomenon both belongs to the past decade of net-based activism and highlights the potential of social networks to make this type of organising even more inventive and sophisticated in the future.
At the same time, this particular protest (and this form of mobilisation) exclude the many who do not belong to the technological and transnational elites which they favour. Moreover, by avoiding the classic approaches of civil-society work - including the formation of alliances with NGOs, political parties, human-rights groups, and trade unions - the march organisers disregard traditional forms and institutions of democratic action. In doing so, they privilege a fragmented and highly individualised perspective of reality over one that embodies shared, public action for social improvement. "