Paradox Number One: Social media foments revolution, but a sudden removal of social media can increase mobilization and create even more unrest.
We can all stand witness to the ways in which social and news media can spread a movement within and across nations. I know an Egyptian who claimed that her family and friends knew that the revolution was going to occur in the weeks and days before it actually happened. How? Just by the messages on social media and between individuals. In a similar fashion, social media proposed and flamed the fires of the occupy wall street movement in the weeks before it emerged, grew, and took hold as a real story in mainstream media outlets.
The protest was set to start on the 17th. At first, there was a kind of silence. People questioned whether it was happening at all.
Interestingly, Al Jazeera was one of the media outlets which first recognized the plan for a protest. Other small news organizations online followed the story from September 17th on. The New York Times City Room blog picked up the story on September 19th, while nothing was put into print until September 25th, when a version of a September 23rd online article titled “Protesters Are Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim“ and beginning with the sentence “By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka,” was published.
Since then the General Assembly of the occupation has released a declaration and the movement has its own subreddit. However, the lack of specific demands, particularly from the outset, has been seen as a weakness and has led some people to propose their own.
Clearly, social media has played a key role in this movement. Yet, ultimately, social media doesn’t stray very far from a standard news cycle. Here are Google searches and news stories for occupy wall street:
(courtesy of Google Trends)
And here are the tweets containing occupywallstreet:
(taken from Trendistic)
The tweets, Google searches, and news reference frequency all have peaks on the first day of the protest, on Sept. 25 when images of pepper spray being used by the NYPD spread and a high number of arrests occured, and on Oct. 1 when 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. Eventually, though, whether the movement has succeeded or not, it will fall out of the news cycle and off of people’s radar. Even though as I type this Egyptians are protesting military rule in Tahrir Square, not many Americans do searches related to Egypt these days:
It’s unfortunate, but it appears that social media news runs alongside the news cycle. Facebook posts can catch our attention, but only for so long, and what seems to be fueling tweets about the protest are acts of violence rather than its actual rationale. Also, isn’t there a risk that we are beginning to confuse posting items on Facebook with really exercising our civic duty? Last week five or more of my friends posted about the execution of Troy Davis, but how many actually took action in contacting local representatives or representatives in Georgia?
In fact, a Yale student recently claimed to have proven that, based on what occurred in Egypt, a “sudden interruption of mass communication accelerates revolutionary mobilization and proliferates decentralized contention.” A journalist quickly used the study to point out how mass media, even as it spreads consciousness, can create a passive public.
Paradox Number Two: Social media brings networks of people with like interests together, but in doing so it can create information bubbles.
In May of this year Eli Pariser presented a TED Talk in which he warned about how Google, Facebook, and other online companies use algorithms that customize what information is presented to people based on their individual tastes:
Thus, just by virtue of being ourselves, our internet is filtered. We go further to filter our own experience when we read websites that cater to our cultural background or to our political interests. Despite a study which seems to indicate that this personal filtering is not an issue, Bill Davidow and Ethan Zuckerman have argued that online media can give too much attention to extreme groups and views, and that “positive feedback” loops might push us to take more extreme views ourselves. Eric E. Schmidt, the chief of Google, takes a middle ground view on the issue, acknowledging that for those who don’t know how to curate their own information, the internet can be a breeding ground of ignorance.
In the classroom, discussing and giving assignments that reflect on how media is curated, either invisibly or explicitly, in different contexts (on Wikipedia, in academic journals, on Facebook, in Google Scholar) can give students a wake-up call regarding how they navigate the web (and increasingly, how the web navigates them).