User:Jugal Paryani/sandbox

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Common 'share' buttons, portraying the ease of disseminating information through social networking.

21st-century social media as a political mobilizer is a relatively recent concept analyzed to discover social media's impact in the political arena. Ever since the rise of the internet in the early 1990s the number of users connected online have exponentially grown from the low millions to the low billions only within a few years, “since its inception and subsequent diffusion, the Internet has been lauded as a potent democratizing agent.” With the advent of social media, a further expansion and connectivity of the public sphere is clear through social network technologies such as blogs, vlogs, email, instant messaging and voice over IP. Social media is also now integrated in almost all our communication technologies, be it our workstations, phones or tablets. Social networking now accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the US – its popularity is undeniable, but its effectiveness and impact as a political agent is constantly debated. “Recent events in Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen—and in other locations such as Moldova, Georgia, Palestine, and China—have stimulated a great deal of discussion on the use(s) of social media for the purposes of political dissent and activist organization, as well as the effect of such use on local, national, and international politics.”

The capacity and capability of social media as a social or political influence should not be underestimated, they are not mere forms of entertainment but rather networks that “are multifaceted communication systems, held together by historical relations that allow for dynamic, emergent, adaptive and flexible associations.” These networks have brought out certain demographics seemed to be apolitical, such as young entrepreneurs, government workers, and the urban middle class onto a public floor of further engagement and discussion of governmental systems – particularly in single-party states. “These are the networks that are passing a cascading message of fatigue with authoritarian rule” witnessed across the globe from the Middle East to East Asia and Europe. As any threat to authoritarian rule, social media has faced constant opposition from single-party states to prevent organized opposing communities. To counter these movements “some regimes have developed very aggressive censorship strategies. Despite those efforts, there is a strong trend towards increasing civic use of social networking software and digital applications that are not controlled by political elites.”

Production of and Interaction with News

With participation in social media on the rise, censorship strategies from single-party states are not surprising as it becomes increasingly more difficult to control media and news within the state. The advent of 2.0 social technologies allows people who have been consumers of news now have the ability to be creators. The public are obtaining and shaping their information differently than they have in the past. This has enormous implications towards the public in single-party states, not only are they allowed to share their own uncensored stories and experiences to the masses, but do not have to be confined to a top-down, dictatorial monopoly of news media. Social media allows easy access to online channels where discussions over governmental policies that affect the public directly or indirectly can take place. Social media is used as a tool to facilitate common ideologies as it allows communities to realize they share grievances and have transportable strategies for mobilizing political reforms.

The internet has changed the way people interact with information, in the same way “social media has fundamentally changed the way people interact with media. Open platforms like Twitter allow one to get a global picture of the media landscape—a landscape that was previously hidden and private.” It is undeniable that the internet as enhanced worldwide access to information, but now with social media, so has the way information is shared. News updates on the web through social media technologies transform social graphs “into a highly organized information distribution system... with far greater speed, reach, impact, and resonance” than traditional news media. A lot of the news is now filtered through social media sites before reaching the user by their friends, colleagues and acquaintances (networks). With a more closely connected and amplified community the users receive more relevant information that pertains to them and interests them individually. As states and their operational systems become increasingly complicated, access to information in an easy form becomes exponentially important for sound understandings and ideas from the public. The advent of social media can be seen as almost an evolutionary adaptation to filter and organize information relevant to individual concerns with the ever so dynamic communications landscape we have in place today. “As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action.”

As internet connectivity is continually improved “social media have become a fact of life for civil society worldwide, involving many actors -- regular citizens, activists, nongovernmental organizations, telecommunications firms, software providers, governments.” The public floor for political debate is gradually becoming more accessible, encouraging participation through a sense of community. The old gatekeepers are deteriorating and people are becoming their own and one another’s editors. The people who are overlooked in mainstream media, will use social media to gather and share information and use it to stitch online communities. Social media has the potential to, if not already has, strengthen civil society and the public sphere.

Sociology of New Media

Social media is a newer model or form of mass communication, studying the effects of traditional forms of media on the public pertains to social media as well. It is generally agreed social media does contain similar limitations shared by traditional forms of media in formulating public opinion. Though social media does have fundamental differences in the way information is created, received and shared, and therefore arguably interpreted. Sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, study of political opinion after the 1948 U.S. presidential election discovered that mass media alone do not change people's minds; instead, there is a two-step process. Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get reiterated by friends, family members, and colleagues. “It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.”

The dissipation of information is not a major factor of particular importance in forming public opinion, though “little political change happens without the dissemination and adoption of ideas and opinions in the public sphere. Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation.” In this feature of ‘access to conversation’ is where social media are particularly important and differentiates it from other forms traditional media. Though other forms of mass communication are open to feedback and generating discussions, they are not as accessible and as effective in real-time as online social networking. This is not due to changing traditional culture of feedback, rather it lies in the operations in and the features of the media.

Features of Social Media

Social media brings about two particularly prominent features to the communications landscape – the changing role played by journalists and user participation in disseminating information. Social media has revolutionized the way journalists interact with their audience. Purely traditional media based journalists were often not given the spotlight and remained behind their news organizations and publications whereas “social media journalists, in contrast, can reach the audience directly and build a more personal presence. The personal popularity of journalists... shows that the size of a journalist’s audience often rivals the size of his media organization’s audience and sometimes even exceeds it.” According to the study “Media Landscape in Twitter: A World of New Conventions and Political Diversity”, the majority of the audience following a journalist do not overlap with the followers of their parent organization, rather the overlap between the two remain relatively small. The study “found that journalists are 6 times more likely than media organizations to receive a mention for each of their tweets. Journalists also converse reciprocally with audience; they are 5.4 times more likely than media organizations to reply to mentions received.” It is probable the reason between these drastic differences is rooted in the way journalists and media organizations interact with their audience. The way journalists make publications now and interact through social media has fundamentally changed – they are not limited to news or story-related information, but also reflect on personal anecdotes and greetings. This has strong implications in creating a repertoire with the audience, humanizing a media source makes the audience feel more comfortable, willing to trust and connect with the source.

As for user participation, social media features an empowerment of users, allowing them easy and free-flowing access to sharing news, videos and stories through hyperlinks. It is crucial to remember all the information and interaction through social media are not actively made by the companies that run them, but rather a system only propelled by user contributions, social media acts “as an echochamber allowing various different communities to easily access the news.”

There seems to be two major forces driving the latest evolution of interpersonal communication online that is Facebook and Twitter. There are particular attributes within these forces that facilitate its usage on the web. Facebook Connect, a service through Facebook, “allows any other Web site to log in users with their Facebook ID instead of a site-specific login. Beyond that, Facebook Connect allows other sites to shape users’ experiences through profile information, such as their list of Facebook friends.” News organizations are quick to implement Facebook Connect, promoting their media through the usage of a very popular medium. Another significant attribute is the implementation of Application Programming Interface (API) – a specific set of coding rules and structures that have made Twitter open to software development tweaks, “it has enabled the creation of an enormous variety of applications that tap into its ever-growing database of 140-character snippets without requiring the user to visit Twitter.com.”

Accuracy and Authority

Civilians are constantly updating and reporting what they see or hear, this “dramatically reduces the time between an event and collective awareness, growing increasingly pervasive and prominent along the way.” There is a divide between the occurrence of an event and its journalistic reporting in media organizations, this gap is immediately filled with user updates. These updates are rapidly spread through social networks, be it completely or partially based on facts. To compete with citizen media, mainstream media organizations are forced to follow trending topics, but are able to only produce and broadcast media after the news has been formed in social networks, because of “time required to discern, document, fact check, and publish material information.” However as mainstream media lags behind in breaking news against media generated within social networks, it is more trusted because of its dedication to discover, verify and report fact. Though, through the constant interactions that take place in social media, inaccurate information can be quickly drowned out from the top stories and eventually be just as accurate as mainstream sources. Mainstream sources may be losing recognition as a destination for breaking news, but is still looked as an authoritative figure in disseminating intelligence of the story as it emerges.

Authority in news media is essential to the way news is interpreted by the masses. As people realize they look towards unsupervised processes for information, and more importantly when they realize their networks do as well, it means that to those groups, those unsupervised processes will be authoritative. It is irrelevant if a group has vouched for a source formally or informally, but rather what place that source has in their ritual for seeking information. Authority performs a dual function, “looking to authorities is a way of increasing the likelihood of being right, and of reducing the penalty for being wrong.” An authoritative source is not defined by an individual’s beliefs, but by the community’s combined beliefs. It is impossible for a particular source to be correct every time, thus Clay Shirky argues people are more likely to feel better being wrong following an authoritative source than otherwise because then it does not seem to be their fault.

Social Media in the Arab Spring

A main concern in the discussions regarding social media as a political mobilizer is how can we measure its role and impact directly? Project on Information Technology and Political Islam (PITPI) tackled this by studying the effects of social media in the Arab Spring (mainly Egypt and Tunisia) in the report ‘Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab Spring?’ The study analyzes 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts. The study claims to find three major findings: social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring; a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground; and social media helped spread democratic ideas across international borders. Observational data is usually scrutinized, as there are many other factors culturally underlying the actions of the Arab states but it is not feasible, practical and perhaps not even possible to experiment political mobilizations strictly through social media.

It is important to differentiate the role social media had in the Arab Spring from what it seems to have been hyped to be. The role of social media has been exaggerated by social network companies to promote their brand and to make Western consumers feel more involved, social media coverage on the Arab Spring had a larger importance to Western consumers than it did to the rebels in Tahrir Square or Tunisia. The study by PITPI does not claim social media was the singular reason for the political actions in the Arab Spring nor is it claiming social media is responsible for fundamentally altering societal practices. Social media technologies are not a way to replace political real-world actions, but rather a way to coordinate them.

The Future of Journalism and Newspapers

Journalists’ future prospects are regularly scrutinized with the advent of social media. The idea behind this derives from the fact that the public are now fully able to generate and contribute their own stories, though it is much more complicated than just that. Professional journalism requires academic skills, experience in writing and story-telling capabilities. Social media, if anything, have enhanced the work journalists do. Journalism as a concept and as a craft is as important as ever, but what is changing is some of the methods journalists must engage in. For journalists to survive they must incorporate themselves with social media, to keep an eye on public interest and bring journalistic values to these environments that have captured the imagination of millions. Journalism as a concept has not changed, and “accuracy, proportionality and fairness, as time-honoured journalistic values, are well worth adoption by those conversing through social networks.” Though verification is important, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for journalists to continually be at the several locations of developing stories and compete with the active bloggers.

As journalists use social media and become more connected and intimate with their audience, they are also weighed down by more responsibility and accountability to their readers. If journalists are tied with certain news organizations, they are also required to be more cautious in writing anything that might undermine the organizations goals and purposes.

An enormous misconception that still haunts journalism today is binding the concept of journalism with newspapers, to make it seem they are virtually indistinguishable. Newspapers, like social media, are models of journalism, but are finding it ever more challenging to compete with online media. Though newspapers are still flourishing in developing economies, newspapers in the West are gradually being used less, especially by the younger demographics. A crucial factor in the diminishing usage of newspapers is the salient fact that printing presses and operating newspaper organizations are very expensive. Advertising in newspapers are low and so is the relative demand, “the competition-deflecting effects of printing cost [initially] got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it.”

Criticism

In Moldova’s 2009 protest against their country’s Communist government and recent protests in Iran have been dubbed ‘Twitter Revolutions.’ Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford University says when this so-called ‘Twitter Revolution’ is analyzed further, Moldova is a country where very few Twitter members exist nor does it seem a significant revolution even took place. In Iran’s case almost all the ‘tweets’ regarding the demonstrations were from the West. Malcolm Gladwell claims in relation to Doug McAdam’s strong and weak-tie theory that though social media can be effective in bringing out social changes through the weak-ties that connect ‘followers’ and subscribers, it does not facilitate high-risk activism for political changes which require strong-ties that are brought out through common experiences.

In the same fashion as social media enhances organization for progressive movements it can also be used to form an ongoing bloc actively pursuing an agenda. Utilizing online tools, a group can quickly grow and recruit, “the larger it becomes and the more money it raises for lobbying and electing candidates pledged to its agenda, the greater its ability to influence elections and policy-making.” The Tea Party and the members of United States congress associated with it can be seen as a group actively creating a bloc to prevent any legislations that may undermine their ideologies.