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Social Media and Major (and Minor) Movements

Originally, this was going to be an entry about some examples of people using social media to mobilize people into action around causes. The examples I was going to go with were two DC-specific things of admittedly minor importance. The first was the cancellation (due to lack of sponsorship) of a popular free outdoor summer movie screening series, Screen on the Green (which ended up being revived, with some credit given to the groundswell of concern on Facebook and other social media sites).

The second was an even more trivial concern, the discovery of the location of the Real World DC house (which is supposed to start filming this weekend), where a series of bloggers built on each other’s efforts to ferret out what was going on (with some folks going up to the site to read permits and talk to workers, or call production companies to get official responses, etc).

And then #IranElection happened.

Talk about getting overtaken by events. Watching people using social media tools to self-organize so they can put their lives on the line to protest a disputed election really puts fretting over silly summer entertainments into perspective.

But it also shows the flexibility and scale of social media tools — you can use them at the level where you are, to focus in on the things that matter to you.

And there’s nothing magical about Twitter or any other tools that are being used. In these kinds of situations, people will use the tools  they’re already using, to engage, mobilize, and coordinate with the groups they’re already familiar with — previously, we’ve seen World Bank and IMF protestors using SMS text messaging; Moldova probably gets the mantle of the first Twitter-enabled revolution.

What makes Internet-enabled movements different is the speed at which they’re able to bring groups together, the difficulty the authorities or other opponents have in countering the tools, and the ability of people outside the immediate area of impact to participate.

Actually, one thing I’m thinking about is how much external observers are really participating, and how much is just gussied-up spectating. Of the many things that Web users outside Iran can do to try to help, some seem genuinely useful (setting up proxies to help people evade blocks), some are troubling (participating in distributed denial-of-service attacks of government sites), some are of questionable value (changing your Twitter time settings to Tehran time to foil Iranian intelligence services from trying to ferret out local users), and some are just silly (changing your icon or Web site colors to green).

While knowing what’s going on in the world is almost always a good thing, world events aren’t like quantum events — far enough removed, we don’t change events merely by observing them, no matter how much we’d like it to be so.

Anyway, I and many others will be watching with interest to see what happens. I just think it’s useful to be reminded of the limits of one’s ability to really influence remote events, even in an interconnected world.

Am I being too cynical? Not cynical enough? Please leave a comment.

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