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.