The Political Power of Social Media (Shirky, Clay)

I found this article very interesting and inspiring when thinking about a pitch for class. It is truly amazing how social media can have a huge impact on our world and government. It shows us that social media brings us together in many ways, within hours people can gather for protest for something that is incredibly important. Shirky begins the article by talking about the Philippines in 2001 which was before facebook and twitter, this protest was arranged by a mass text!

“The publics ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response — close to seven million 

text messages were sent that week — so alarmed the country’s legislators that they reversed 

course and allowed the evidence to be presented. Estrada’s fate was sealed; by January 20, 

he was gone.” (Shirky)

If a mass text could cause this much change in a place I wonder why we aren’t taking more advantage of our abilities to reach out via social media. Don’t get me wrong, people do a lot of good though social media for people who need help. When natural disasters occur, social media is a great way to get information and help out to that area. People are able to see pictures within minutes of devastation pushing them to lend a helping hand in any way they can.

One term Shirky brings up is “slacktivism”, described as “casual participants seek social change through low-cost activities, such as joining Facebook’s “Save Darfur” group, that are long on bumper-sticker sentiment and short on any useful action.” (Shirky) I think this is our main problem with not using social media to its advantage, joining a group does nothing for a cause. Joining the group, reading, informing and most importantly, literally taking action is what causes changes. Civil rights activists didn’t just “click like” and then go on with their day like nothing happened, they formed a group and took action. Forming a facebook group should only be the beginning, not the end. 

Shirky mentions a downside to this social media issue, when it comes to controlling governments. Governments have seen what social media can do in the past, over throw them. So now they are doing what they can in order to limit social media outreach when it comes to something like over throwing a government. The article also mentions the censoring of media in general, protests in China after an earthquake became dangerous to the Chinese government so media coverage was stopped. Since media coverage on this specific protest ended, there was no social media discussion on the issue therefor it was not common knowledge to most people.