« May 2008 | Main | July 2008 »
June 2, 2008
Social Media and Social Activism
I want to do some more rumination on this topic in later posts. In the mean time, I want to share an interesting clip and blog post that discusses the power of using mainstream social media sites for social advocacy -- specifically vs. using more niche social activism tools. Briefly, the idea is that governments (such as China) have a more difficult time blocking messages they deem subversive when communicated through mainstream tools tools such as Facebook and Flickr. As Ethan Zuckerman states in his 2007 blog post, "Web 2.0 was created so that people could publish cute photos of their cats...the users looking for cute cat videos get annoyed [when] YouTube is blocked."
This is not to say advocacy groups should not try to create there own networks outside of FaceBook (see Citizen Lab for a really cool example) but the "cute cat theory" is compelling and potentially empowers activists who are less technologically adept. As more of these social media sites open up their networks via APIs, it should be really interesting to see what kinds of social activism tools are created to leverage these networks. In some ways, these will be the true examples of the "viral" nature of the Internet.
A link to an article from the MESH conference.
Read Ethan Zuckerman's original post on the topic.
Posted by Jason at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack