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Political change: What social media can do and can't do.
As people rose up in North Africa,
Time Magazine, HuffPost, even the New York Times,
asked if events there could be called a Facebook Revolution.
While these revolutions may have occurred without social media,
the speed at which they have occurred
would have been much, much different.
I think social media has been very important.
Social media gives them a safe place.
They don't need to know anything about you on Twitter or Facebook.
At a time of crisis I think people are searching for information
wherever they can find it. If they have Internet access,
Facebook is a place to which they turn.
One of the darlings of the movement, Facebook,
was created on the East Coast of America.
But only when it reached the West Coast, in California,
its explosive growth took off. So how does California
see the role of social media in effecting change?
When you look at revolutions, you usually have a leader.
You usually have a cadre of individuals who are the cause,
the motivation.
But now we are seeing revolutions without that.
We see democratic change, or what we hope is democratic change,
occur in a very broad base of support that is leaderless.
So how does social media help bring about this change?
Social media, what it has done is to really, suddenly show the light
on perhaps the vastness of the wealth at the top.
And also on what is possible in other countries.
Once you allow people to begin expressing themselves
and then when they find other people,
who they might not meet in their day-to-day life,
who have the same feeling, that's a very powerful process.
You get a point where suddenly,
you know, the cauldron boils over
and people suddenly see that they are not the only ones.
It's like a rapid wild fire, in a sense, with a big wind,
which suddenly brings people in contact
who realise that many feel the way they do,
and that it might be possible to do something about it.
And why has use of social media spread so quickly?
The good thing is that the tools are free or very low cost.
Facebook and Twitter are free. You can start a Ning website
which is another social media website.
Individuals can now organise almost costlessly,
share information almost costlessly,
and that allows them to share ideas, to gather,
to call for change in a very short order,
whereas before it would have been much more difficult.
But this is only part of the picture. How much credit can social media
take for the recent political changes in North Africa?
Social media is much broader than sending 144 characters over Twitter
or updating your status posts on Facebook. Those are useful,
but if you look at how people are sharing videos and information,
in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya,
it's primarily through SMS. It’s not primarily through Twitter.
So how did the phrase Facebook Revolution come about?
There is much about these uprisings that people cannot understand.
They are looking for some sort of rationale. How did this happen?
I think they are jumping onto this bandwagon of…
Here are the latest toys, and look at everybody playing with them.
This is not to denigrate the role of social media,
but as people try to figure it all out they are saying:
Here are the tools that made it happen. I think that's not true.
We observe Twitter so we give Twitter a lot of credit,
but there’s a lot more communication going on.
For those people who call this the Twitter or Facebook Revolution,
I think that's a misnomer that is unfair to the people
who went onto the streets and risked or even lost their lives
in the cause of these revolutions.
The facts on the ground in North Africa seem to confirm
the limits of social media’s role there.
In Egypt, the greatest growth in the protests occurred
after the government shut down the Internet.
I think social media starts the idea. It gets people involved.
But then, the protest will take a life of its own.
The Egyptian government shut down everything it could.
Everything from the Internet to the train system.
The idea was to try to paralyse this movement, but it didn't work.
These revolutionary movements develop a kind of momentum
and once they get rolling it doesn't matter what the government does.