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Politics 3.0

May 12, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

(An excerpt from my new book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media, just published by City Lights. To purchase a copy, go here. And for an an ebook from Amazon, go here.)

On December 17, 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself afire. Within months, much of the Arab world was ablaze as well.

Bouazizi’s fatal self-immolation sparked what later became known as the Arab Spring and led to the demise of dictators not only in his country, but in neighboring Egypt and Libya as well. It reverberated among other repressive rulers and regimes in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and beyond. Ultimately it resonated far from Bouazizi’s rural hometown of Sidi Bouzid—including thousands of miles away in New York City, where Occupy Wall Street movement began nine months to the day after his desperate act in opposition to voicelessness and powerlessness. The Occupy movement gave rise in turn to more than a thousand similar protests around the world and the creation of a global movement. From London, Madrid and Rome to Athens, Tel Aviv and Tokyo, millions were suddenly on the march, demanding, as had Bouazizi, more respect, hope, dignity and democracy.

They called themselves “the 99%” in opposition to the ruling 1%—the dictators like Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi, but also those they dubbed “banksters,” the investment bankers and financial manipulators who had gamed the economic system to their own benefit and then, supposedly too big to fail, forced the rest of society to bail them out. On the heels of the Great Recession, the American Autumn, like the Arab Spring that preceded it, became as much an economic as a democratic revolt. As one writer, Rebecca Solnit, later asked in an open letter to the dead Bouazizi, “What were all those dictatorships and autocracies for, if not to squeeze as much profit as possible out of subjugated populations—profit for rulers, profit for multinational corporations, profit for that 1%?”

Mohamed Bouazizi was neither the first Tunisian to kill himself in protest of the economic and political conditions in his country nor the last. But something was different about his story, or at least the way it had been told. Bouazizi’s personal rebellion led first to a successful societal revolution against a man who had ruled Tunisia for decades with an iron fist, and later to others that dislodged dictators in Egypt and Libya. Why? Did it have anything to do, as some have suggested, with the rise of social media?

Not long after the fall of the Tunisian dictator, many observers, including U.S. President Barack Obama, proclaimed that social media had in fact played a key role in events there, as well as in Egypt, where strongman Hosni Mubarak’s regime was also toppled. Writing for the Reuters news agency, for example, Philip N. Howard, author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, noted that Bouazizi’s death had “activated a transnational network of citizens exhausted by authoritarian rule… It was social media that spread both the discontent and inspiring stories of success from Tunisia across North Africa and into the Middle East.” Among the lessons for the West, Howard concluded, were the facts that “a larger network of citizens now has political clout, largely because of social media,” and that “democratization has become more about social networks than political change driven by elites.”

Months later, after analyzing more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, he and other scholars at the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam published a study claiming “social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring,” and noting that, “conversations about revolution often preceded major events on the ground, and social media carried inspiring stories of protest across international borders.”

Howard, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, said the evidence “suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising. People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”

During the week before Mubarak’s resignation, for example, the rate of tweets about political change in Egypt increased ten-fold and videos featuring protest and political commentary went viral, with the top two- dozen receiving nearly five and a half million views. The amount of content produced in Facebook and political blogs by opposition groups also increased dramatically. Ironically, government efforts to crack down on social media may only have incited more activism, especially in Egypt. People who were isolated by efforts to shut down the Internet, largely middle-class Egyptians, may have gone to the streets when they could no longer follow the unrest through social media.

“Recent events show us that the public sense of shared grievance and potential for change can develop rapidly,” Howard concluded. “These dictators for a long time had many political enemies, but they were fragmented. So opponents used social media to identify goals, build solidarity and organize demonstrations.”

Other researchers and scholars, however, are not so sure of the actual role social media played in facilitating the protests. Writing in mid-September, 2011 on nextgov.com, a web site devoted to “technology and the business of government,” Joseph Marks reported that although experts were in agreement that, “Something extraordinary happened at the nexus of social media and political action during the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa…just what happened is less clear.” While Twitter and other social media had become a megaphone that disseminated information about the uprisings to the outside world, Marks said, “a comprehensive study of Tweets about the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings” between January and March found that more than 75 percent of people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to the uprisings were from outside the Arab world.

As one researcher, GWU associate professor John Sides, noted, “This obviously suggests that new media presents a tremendous opportunity to inform an international audience, but it also raises the question: ‘Will they be there tomorrow?’” Sides said public attention spans in the Western world are limited and cited Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution as an example. Although the Iranian events attracted a surge of international activity on Twitter, attention dwindled shortly after the death of pop icon Michael Jackson (See Chapter 7).

Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation at the U.S. State Department, supported the idea that social media had played a determinant role in the Arab Spring. Ross said the use of social media during the uprisings signaled the beginning of a “massive transfer of power from nation states and large institutions to individual and small institutions.” Other panelists warned, however, that, “data on the role of social media during the Arab spring is so disparate and confusing it is nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from it.”

Cyber-Realists vs. Cyber-Utopians

The ongoing controversy over whether and to what extent social media helped create the democratic surge of the Arab Spring brought to the fore earlier disagreements between “cyber-utopians” and more skeptical “cyber-realists” such as Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Gladwell’s New Yorker article, headlined “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” created a storm of reaction—most of it negative—when it was published two months before Mohamed Bouazizi’s death.

“The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution,” Gladwell had written. “The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Like Morozov, Gladwell was convinced that those he derided as “digital evangelists” had, at the very least, vastly overstated the impact of social media on the new wave of political activism.

As evidence he cited reaction to the protests in both Iran and Moldova in 2009. When thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Moldova against their country’s government, Gladwell noted, “The action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together.” And when protests later erupted in Tehran, the U.S. State Department asked Twitter executives to suspend previously scheduled maintenance of the service so it could still be used as an organizing tool during the demonstrations.

Gladwell remembered derisively that former U.S. national-security adviser Mark Pfeifle had called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and had said, “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.” He also recalled former U.S. State Department official James K. Glassman telling a crowd of activists that sites like Facebook “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These were “strong, and puzzling, claims,” Gladwell said. After all, “Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet?” Like Morozov, Gladwell believed “Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution” was impossible since very few Twitter accounts exist there. As for Iran, the people “tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.”

Writing in Foreign Policy, Radio Free Europe correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari supported Gladwell’s conclusion. “Simply put: there was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran,” Esfandiari stated forthrightly. Twitter’s impact inside Iran was nil, she believed, as did the manager of one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, Mehdi Yahyanejad, whom Esfandiari quoted as saying, “Here [in the United States,] there is lots of buzz. But once you look, you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.” Those who disagreed, Esfandiari continued, were lazy and uninformed. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Grandiose claims for new media forms were only to be expected, Gladwell concluded. “Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model.” But there was something else at work, as well: “in the outsized enthusiasm for social media…we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

Two months after Bouazizi’s death, amid a new spate of claims that the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were also Twitter or alternately, Facebook-inspired, Evgeny Morozov decried as “cyber-utopians” those who believe “the Arab spring has been driven by social networks.” In a post for the UK Guardian, Morozov argued that they “ignore the real-world activism underpinning them.”

Morozov began his argument by restating theirs, reductio ad absurdum: “Tweets were sent. Dictators were toppled. Internet = democracy. QED.” He found it sad but entertaining, he said, to watch as “adherents of the view that digital tools of social networking such as Facebook and Twitter can summon up social revolutions out of the ether trip over one another.” He also complained about what he called “the ongoing persecution of Malcolm Gladwell.”

Second, he suggested that social media “by the very virtue of being ‘social’—lends itself to glib, pundit-style overestimations of its own importance.” He then added, with no small degree of snark, “Perhaps the outsize revolutionary claims for social media now circulating throughout the West are only a manifestation of western guilt for wasting so much time on social media: after all, if it helps to spread democracy in the Middle East, it can’t be all that bad to while away the hours ‘poking’ your friends and playing FarmVille.”

Morozov, Gladwell and their allies cloak their argument in academic terms often used to describe different types of social capital within networks. They believe what they call “high-risk, real world activism,” such as that demonstrated during the Arab Spring, to be a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

“The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all,” Gladwell wrote. “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

Social networks are “simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger,” he said, making it “easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.

“There is strength in weak ties…. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information,” Gladwell conceded. But those same weak ties, “seldom lead to high-risk activism,” he concluded. “The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend.”

Social networks, these naysayers claim, are ill-suited to real-world activism and high-risk strategies such as those employed during Arab Spring—”boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations”—because they are messy, non-hierarchical, and cannot provide the necessary discipline and strategy. When taking on a powerful and organized establishment, Gladwell declared, “You have to be a hierarchy.”

The explanation for why Mohamed Bouazizi’s death uncorked such a fury of change, however, is more nuanced than either of the dueling cyber-camps is willing to admit, as a closer examination of the protests in Tunisia and later in Tahrir Square in Cairo as well as the various Occupy demonstrations that followed in other parts of the world, seems to suggest. In the North Africa/Middle East region, a pan-Arab collaboration of young activists skilled in the use of technology did in fact given birth to a new movement dedicated to spreading democracy. They were strategic and disciplined, even as they shied from hierarchy. They relied not only on tactics of nonviolent resistance but also those of marketing borrowed from Silicon Valley. Tunisians and Egyptians did share expertise and experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the protests that set off the Arab Spring, explained to the New York Times.

That being said, it is also true that both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts were literally decades in the making. Speaking in June 2011 at the eight annual Personal Democracy Forum, a procession of young Arab activists who had all been intimately involved in the spring revolts, explained the process of how they and millions of supporters were “weaving a network for change” in their countries, and what role the emerging media played in making that happen. From Riadh Guerfali to Dr. Rasha Abdulla to Mona Eltahawy to Alaa Abdel Fattah, they noted the Arab Spring actions were emphatically not “Twitter” or “Facebook” revolutions that had coalesced online, but were instead the outcome of decades of networked resistance offline.

At the same time, they said, the revolts were clearly facilitated, and to some extent accelerated, by the decentralized organizing power of the new social media. The results of this offline/online action mashup were surprisingly successful revolutions that overthrew long-entrenched political forces. As Alaa Abdel Fattah pointed out in his remarks at the forum, the roots of the revolution in Egypt went back as far as 1972 and efforts made by his parents’ generation. Ultimately, he explained, they had been stymied by a clever power structure that painstakingly divided and thus conquered the protesters, marginalizing some and buying others off with favor and access. Decades later, Fattah pointed out, the emerging social media suddenly made it possible “to make noises louder online, to build local movements with one narrative and then build them online to a mass movement.” As another speaker at the forum, Omoyele Sowore, explained, “The Internet has helped revolution; but the Internet is not revolution.”

Filed Under: Arab spring, Egypt revolution, journalism, social media Tagged With: Arab Spring, Egypt revolution, Facebook, journalism, social media, social networks

This Just Out: Friends, Followers and the Future

April 21, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I began researching and writing here years ago about the ongoing digital information revolution and the impact of emerging social media. I’m pleased to announce, therefore, the publication this week of my newest book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media.

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, one of smartest media observers and writers around, called Friends, Followers and the Future, “A timely book about a vital subject, and added, ” If you want to understand the future of news, its opportunities and its pitfalls, read this book.”

Former CBS News President Andrew Heyward said it tells “a story that moves as swiftly as the dizzying pace of change itself,” and concluded, “Anyone who cares about the impact of the digital information revolution on democracy and culture can’t afford to miss it.”

And publishing industry bible Kirkus Reviews called FFF “an erudite, constructive analysis,” adding that ”O’Connor pulls no punches and effectively tracks the gains and losses of the movement in clear, energetic language.” (For a less generous assessment, go here…)

If you’d like to decide for yourself — and you want to support independent publishers and booksellers — you can purchase the book directly from City Lights, the wonderful Lawrence Ferlinghetti-created West Coast miracle I’m pleased to be published by.

Of course, you can also buy the book — and pretty much anything else you can think of – from Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, along with many other outlets.

Also, I’m about to go on a mini-promotional tour to a number of locations on both the East and West Coasts, and would of course love to see you all at one of the many bookstores sponsoring my readings and appearances.

And finally, it will of course be wonderful if you help spread the word about my new book on social media by using social media yourself… So please, if you like the book, tell YOUR friends and followers! As Nielsen’s most recent Global Trust in Advertising Survey shows, ”word-of-mouth recommendations” from friends and family are trusted above all other forms of communication — at least according to 92% of respondents in 56 different countries. (To which I can only add that “word of mouse” recommendations are also highly trusted!) As Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen, noted, “Consumers around the world continue to see recommendations from friends…as by far the most credible.”

So please– help spread the word and tell YOUR friends and followers about Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media.

Thank you!

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: brands, social media, social networks

Facebook Is Not Your Friend. Mark Zuckerberg Is Not Your Friend Either.

April 15, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

Trustworthy?

“Imagine . . . that you knew which sites—or what news stories—people you trust found useful and which they disliked,” David Kirkpatrick wrote in the June 11, 2007 issue of Fortune magazine. “This isn’t fantasy. Facebook might make it possible, and soon. Yes, the social-networking site college kids spend so much time on—the one you thought was just about hooking up—could turn out to be more important than any of us thought.”

Kirkpatrick, who was then Fortune’s Senior Editor for Internet and Technology, went on to write the best-selling The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World, the definitive book on the company. He was prescient. In a startlingly short period of time, Facebook did make it possible for you to find those trusted and useful news sites and stories—along with much, much more.

Now, with Facebook facing growing scrutiny in advance of its IPO next month, which is expected to value the Internet giant at $100 billion, the question of trust looms even larger. True, the social networking giant has made it easier than ever before to find trusted friends and followers, who can now create, curate, aggregate and distribute news and information with an unprecedented ease, as I detail in my new book Friends, Followers and The Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media.

But is Facebook itself, the billion dollar baby whose rapid growth has yet to be slowed by continuing controversy over the privacy of its more than 800 million users, itself worthy of our trust? Can we rely on its wunderkind CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has repeatedly pronounced privacy to be outmoded and argued that we are living in a new era beyond it, to safeguard our interests? Despite our differing — some would say competing — concerns, should we regard Facebook and Zuckerberg as our friends?

After all, the online social network, which offers its tools, technologies, and services at no cost, makes profit primarily by using heretofore private information it has collected about you to target advertising. And Zuckerberg has repeatedly made sudden, sometimes ill conceived and often poorly communicated policy changes that resulted in once-private personal information becoming instantly and publicly accessible. As a result, once-latent concerns over privacy, power and profit have bubbled up and led both domestic and international regulatory agencies to scrutinize the company more closely.

In one case, consumer protection groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and fourteen others, filed a 2009 unfair-trade complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accusing Facebook of unfair and deceptive trade practices that “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.” It said that Facebook’s decisions to disclose previously restricted “personal information to the public” had violated users’ expectations, diminished their privacy, and contradicted its own representations. It asked the FTC to order the company to “restore privacy settings that were previously available . . . and give users meaningful control over personal information,” to investigate Facebook’s trade practices, require the company to restore privacy settings that were previously available and force it to “give users meaningful control over personal information.”

Facebook settled in November 2011 by agreeing to refrain from making any further deceptive privacy claims, to obtain consumers’ approval before changing the way it shares their data, and to undergo independent third-party auditing for 20 years. Shortly after the uproar subsided, however, renewed concerns over privacy and trust began to shake the brand again. This privacy blunder centered on Facebook’s belated admission that it was still tracking the web pages its members visited, even after they have logged out of the Facebook site. As Daniel Bates reported for the Daily Mail, “The social networking giant says the huge privacy breach was simply a mistake—that software automatically downloaded to users’ computers when they logged in to Facebook ‘inadvertently’ sent information to the company, whether or not they were logged in at the time. Most would assume that Facebook stops monitoring them after they leave its site, but technology bloggers discovered this was not the case.”

Instead, the tracking information—worth billions of dollars to advertisers—was being sent back to the Facebook servers. Even after you were logged out, Facebook still tracked every page you visited. As Bates noted, “The admission is the latest in a series of privacy blunders from Facebook, which has a record of only correcting such matters when they are brought to light by other people.”

As its executives struggled to explain the “inadvertent” privacy row over its “creepy” web-tracking practices, that trust was shaken once again “by criticism and speculation regarding how it uses browser cookies to get data about users,” as Josh Constine posted on Insidefacebook.com. “A lack of thorough documentation explaining what each of its cookies does has led some observers to assume that the company is tracking offsite browsing behavior in order to target ads. Facebook needs to provide explanations for both the average user and privacy researchers about how exactly its cookies work in order to prevent these press flare-ups from giving users a negative impression and bringing on regulatory scrutiny from governments.”

The company’s growing stature and importance only magnifies such concerns. As Facebook profile pages morph more and more into overall online identities, the inherent tension between our individual desire to protect personal information and the company’s need for that information comes into ever-sharper focus. Last week, for example, Facebook sought once again to address the persistent criticism of its practices by instituting a new policy providing greater transparency on the types of data it stores about you. Yet critics like Max Schrems, a German law student who filed a complaint leading the agreement, still criticize the company’s response. “We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” Schrems told Kevin J. O’Brien of the New York Times. “With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.” In 2011, when Schrems requested his own data from Facebook, he learned that the company was keeping information he had previously deleted from the Web site, and was storing information on his location.

None of that sounds too friendly to me, so I really can’t recommend that you trust Zuckerberg, or Facebook, or indeed any corporation that makes its money by selling you — down the river or anywhere else. And as Nielsen’s Latest Global Trust in Advertising Survey proves, we trust “word-of-mouth recommendation from friends and family” above all other forms of communication. (At least that’s what 92% of respondents in 56 different countries said.)

At the same time, our trust in paid traditional media (including television, magazine and newspaper ads) has steadily declined since 2009. (Trust in television is down 24%; magazines, down 20%; and newspapers down 25%, according to the survey.) “Consumers around the world continue to see recommendations from friends… as by far the most credible,” said Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen.

Trust is essential for the success of any brand. Mark Zuckerberg may think that Facebook’s recurrent privacy flaps haven’t much affected the sometimes anti-social social network, but they represent a huge potential threat to what he has built. The high-handed manner in which members’ personal information had been treated, the lack of consultation or even communication with them beforehand, Facebook’s growing domination of the entire social networking sphere, Zuckerberg’s constant and very public declarations of the death of privacy and his seeming imposition of new social norms all feed growing fears that he and Facebook itself simply can not be trusted. As Zuckerberg’s fellow CEOs from the legacy media should have already learned, losing the trust of your audience is the first step in losing your audience itself—and eventually the power of your brand.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: brands, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, social media

Paranoia Strikes Deep at Google

April 4, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

Google co-founder Larry Page is paranoid—and justifiably so…

As the Associated Press reported this week, Page “has a Facebook fixation…When he replaced his mentor Eric Schmidt as Google’s CEO last April, Page insisted that the company had to be more aggressive about countering the threat posed by Facebook’s ever-growing popularity.”

Why? As I detail in my new book Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media, ”for all its success, by the end of the decade the company faced a host of problems. Google’s awesome power and reach proved to be a double-edged sword; competitors and regulators alike assailed it for a series of antitrust and privacy violations and began demanding remedies. At the same time its Web supremacy came under attack by new competitors such as Facebook and Twitter, as Google lagged behind in what was fast becoming the most engaging and potentially lucrative online phenomenon of all—social media.”

“Social” has now begun to replace “search” as a leading focus of online activity, as the new “contextual Web” takes the place of the data-driven Web of the early 21st Century. This is bad news for Google, even though the company still sold $36.5 billion in advertising last year, ten times more than Facebook. Despite the revenue gap, Facebook poses an existential threat to the continued hegemony of the Internet search giant by constantly amassing vast new amounts of information valuable in targeting ads more precisely to its 800 million users. With Facebook walling off and withholding that advertiser-friendly information from search engines, Google has been forced to play catch-up in the ever-more competitive social network space.

But as I explain in Friends, Followers and the Future, Google simply may not have the necessary “corporate DNA” to succeed in social. Certainly its track record over the years is not good, although Google’s repeated failure in the social networking arena doesn’t result from a lack of desire. As far back as 2003, its executives had tried unsuccessfully to purchase the leading social network Friendster; the next year the company launched its own social network called Orkut. Although the service became popular in India and Brazil, where until recently it remained far ahead of Facebook and other competitors, Orkut never caught on in the United States. As a result, savvy investors such as venture capitalist Fred Wilson complained that Google had ‘missed the whole social networking thing. Facebook beat them to that.’”

Alarmed at the rise of social media and the attendant perception that they had missed something important in the evolution of the Web, Google executives tried again in 2010 by adding what they called a “social networking feature” to the popular Gmail service. Called “Buzz,” this new tool for sharing personal information allowed users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on posts in much the same way they could on Facebook or Twitter. The decision to piggyback the new network onto Gmail, which already had more than 150 million active users, was meant to vault Buzz immediately into the top ranks of social networking sites.

This long-anticipated “Google approach to sharing,” as company flacks phrased it, was clearly an attempt to restore Google’s reputation as an innovative and important force in the digital information space. But would Buzz actually “change the way businesses communicate around the world,” as Google’s director of product management Bradley Horowitz crowed? Was company cofounder Sergey Brin correct in his claim that Google would reinvent social networking in much the same way the company had reinvented search a decade earlier?

The answer soon became obvious, as privacy and trust concerns caused Buzz to flop almost immediately. The hasty decision to use Gmail as the launch pad for building a social network meant that everyone in its user base was instantly enrolled—like it or not. Although Google executives moved swiftly to contain their self-created crisis, rolling out a “privacy reset” that dropped the automatic sign-up and offered clearer instructions on how to opt out and keep messages private, the damage was already done, and Buzz was widely derided as an “antisocial social network.” Nearly a dozen members of Congress expressed concern over claims that Google Buzz “breaches online consumer privacy and trust,” and asked the FTC to investigate. The Electronic Privacy Information Centre alleged that Buzz violated consumer protection law and was “deceptive,” as the service became the subject of a class action lawsuit. Meanwhile, the leading technology blog Mashable called Buzz the “biggest tech flop of the year,” and noted, “With Google’s biggest attempt at social now a mere afterthought, nothing stands in Facebook’s way.”

At the end of June 2011, Google surprised the tech world again by making yet another attempt to compete with social media leaders like Facebook and Twitter: the Google Plus project, heralded as “Real-life-sharing, rethought for the web.” Now, although Google Plus has attracted more than 100 million users since its debut – a number far greater than Facebook’s tally at that stage in its history — the site resembles a cyber-ghost town, where visitors spend an average of just a few minutes per month. Set against the six to seven hours on Facebook, the numbers pale by comparison. Part of the problem is the fabled network effect: with Facebook and Twitter already commanding huge attention, many questioned the need for another entry in the social space. Nevertheless, Google Plus and other social networking features introduced recently will provide Google with a means of learning more about its users’ lives, a la Facebook — and to try to employ that newfound knowledge to sell more ads.

Leading industry analyst Om Malik of GigaOM is among those convinced that we are moving from the “sell-search-and-consume methodology that has become part of our basic Internet behavior and turned Google into a gazillion dollar company” to a new world of social search — which will shift power to individuals using social tools to express their opinions. In other words, it will democratize and humanize the search process by using “friends and followers” instead of algorithms to provide context to and filters for our ever-expanding amount of information.

“The company that is most impacted by these developments is Google, the shining example of the Data Web,” Malik has noted. “By deploying its awesome infrastructure and massive computer resources, Google has enjoyed an advantage over all its search competitors.” But that advantage is now disappearing, as the manner in which we find and use information on the Web is being rapidly transformed. Despite its endless efforts to succeed at being social, Google simply may be incapable of doing so. The company “lacks the DNA that would mark it as a social entity,” says Malik, and it has never “been comfortable dealing with the ‘social or ‘people’ web. Look at any of their offerings—they have the warmth of a Soviet bunker.”

Facebook’s threat will only mount following its impending initial public offering of stock, likely to be completed next month. The IPO, which is expected to raise $5 billion will surpass Google’s 2004 stock market debut as the biggest ever for a U.S. Internet company. “Larry is driven by his paranoia about Facebook,” Ken Auletta, author of the definitive book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. “Clearly, these are two companies at war with each other.”

It’s a war Google — the 21st century equivalent of the still-powerful but increasingly irrelevant Microsoft — may be destined to lose.

Rory O’Connor’s new book Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, will be published this month by City Lights.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: brands, Facebook, google, Larry Page

Rick Santorum: Bowling Alone in the First Digital Election

April 2, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

Rick Santorum went bowling again this week. When right-wing Rick dropped in to Pla-Mor Lanes in Chilton, it marked the fourth pre-primary visit to a Wisconsin bowling alley by a man who actually took Bowling 101 for credit while matriculating at Penn State.

In an interview about his rather extensive bowling background (he says he “grew up in the bowling lanes” of Western Pennsylvania), Santorum made knowing reference to the best-selling book Bowling Alone by Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who used the decline of bowling leagues in small-town America as a metaphor for the disintegration of community life. “ ‘Bowling Alone’ is about the breakdown of social capital in this country,” Santorum said. “People used to come together in leagues and groups…. My dad bowled in a league, and I went with him. He was a lefty. We went on league night, it was part of my childhood.”

Santorum’s conspicuous kegling was “really meant to be a cultural story, who Rick really is,” his chief strategist John Brabender told the New York Times. “I think every presidential candidate wants people to get a peek into their real life so they can make a value judgment.” But the entire made-for-media affair reveals more about Santorum’s backward-looking campaign than it does about his cultural values –especially viewed in light of another presidential campaign story in the same edition of the erstwhile paper of record, headlined “As Viewing Habits Change, Political Ads Switch Screens.” As Jeremy M.Peters reported, “Mitt Romney’s campaign thinks it has found a way to get its ads in front of the increasing number of voters who are not watching traditional television: Find these people online, and show them the ads there.”

While Santorum has been busy throwing balls and strikes, “the Romney campaign and a team of online behavior analysts have spent 18 months… sifting through data on the browsing habits of tens of millions of computer users as the campaign builds a richly detailed cache of potential supporters,” Peters noted. “In doing so, Mr. Romney’s strategists are hoping to turn the Web into a political persuasion tool, signaling a shift in the way modern campaigns view digital advertising. It is no longer merely a supplement for traditional media like television. In some cases, it is a substitute entirely.”

Meanwhile President Obama’s team is also deep into the use of digital data, and his campaign has even hired a private sector specialist to help find ways to target online messages to voters. As Darrell M. West, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, told Peters, the 2012 campaign “will likely become the first truly digital election.”

A similar analysis is at the center of my forthcoming book Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media. In it I explain how the emerging media’s new online social networks possess unique characteristics that make them very different from the old, off-line and real-world social networks described by Professor Putnam in Bowling Alone. To Putnam, social capital “refers to social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance and trustworthiness.” Thanks to their ability to facilitate the easy formation of groups, online networks like Facebook with its 800 million users are creating a vast increase of social capital, rather than furthering the breakdown noted years ago by Putnam (and apparently just this week by Santorum!)

There are different types of social capital, and ultimately, Robert Putnam told me, one distinction “among the many different forms of social capital” is especially important: the fact that “some networks link people who are similar in crucial aspects and tend to be inward-looking—bonding social capital. Others encompass different types of people and tend to be outward-looking—bridging social capital.” Putnam, who once taught Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard, noted that online socnets foster more “weak ties” (casual acquaintances, colleagues), and that their strength lies in providing a wide range of perspectives, information, and opportunities with greater numbers of people than real world networks, which create “strong ties” (with family and close friends, for example) but with far fewer people.

In today’s society, access to information is a key element of status and power and communication is instant, ubiquitous and mobile. Social networking sites are a primary product of this emerging culture. Modern social networking technologies provide people with a very low cost (in terms of time and effort) way to maintain looser or weak social ties, thus enabling a scenario in which people have huge numbers of diverse, but not very close, acquaintances and encouraging us to bridge disparate clusters of friends and followers, who in turn provide us with access to new knowledge. Weak ties of “bridging social capital”—the kinds that exist among people one knows in a specific and limited context—are excellent sources of novel information, and a person who has many weak yet heterogeneous ties has access to a wide range of perspectives.

“It’s hard to imagine we can fix problems outlined in Bowling Alone without the Internet,” Putnam told me. “In some respects at least, we need the Net to fix things, to make it possible to strengthen and create new ties among people. We need to create more alloys and ways to use the Net, like the telephone was used in the past, to strengthen and deepen previous ties, so the Internet might actually help revive social networks in America.”

Barack Obama gets that. So does Mitt Romney, who at least is looking forward for his cultural clues. Looks to me like Rick Santorum will soon be bowling alone.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: Barack Obama, Campaign 2012, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, social media

Roll Up for a Virtual Mystery Tour!

March 27, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

With my new, “lucid and erudite” book on social media about to be published, I’m just beginning the inexorable process of trying to cut through all the clutter and let people know of its existence. Since it’s all about the impact of the digital information revolution and its new social tools and technologies, I thought it might be cool to try some of them as a way of promoting the book — and I encourage you all to join in with me!

Toward that end, I have just created a Facebook event to handle invitations to a virtual book tour being set up by a new tech firm called Shindig. As company exec Eric Yohay explains, “Shindig is a virtual chat technology company that allows authors to not only project themselves onto 1000′s of their fans at once, but lets their fans all interact at the same time.” But the platform isn’t limited to creative types like authors and musicians; each “Shindig” is its own customized video chat space, also useful for events, presentations, parties, and other social functions. So if you like what you see, you can easily host your own.

Anyway, please join me for a magical virtual mystery tour on Wednesday, April 11th at 7pm EST, for “Rory O’Connor’s Virtual Book Tour” when, truly, the medium will be the message! I’ll be discussing my forthcoming book “Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media.” I’ll also try to explain current trends in social media and explore what tech visionaries, media makers, political advisers and businesspeople are saying about the meteoric rise of the various social networks.

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta kindly said, “This is a timely book about a vital subject: How do we get information and is it reliable? If you want to understand the future of news, its opportunities and its pitfalls, read this book.” And Kirkus Reviews said, “”An obvious proponent of the online-media revolution, O’Connor pulls no punches and effectively tracks the gains and losses of the movement in clear, energetic language. An erudite, constructive analysis.”

Please join me in cyberspace –and invite YOUR friends and followers to do so as well — to chat, interact, ask questions and listen to as I read, react and opine…

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Officials Still Hiding the Truth about Fukushima

March 12, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

As the first “anniversary” of the devastating March 11, 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan passes, the ongoing disaster continues regularly to make front page news worldwide. One recent example came with the release of Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation, which revealed the true extent of the astonishing ignorance and arrogance displayed by Japanese industry and government officials alike throughout the emergency. We now know that even as they tried to play down the risks in public, Japan’s leaders were admitting privately that they didn’t actually know the true extent of damage at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. Moreover, they were secretly considering the possibility of somehow evacuating tens of millions of residents of Tokyo’s metropolitan area.

After a powerful earthquake and tsunami shut down the plant’s cooling systems a year ago, officials began talking among themselves about a possible worst-case outcome: the plant could release such large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that it would force the evacuation of millions. At the same they began to worry about a potentially even worse scenario: larger radiation releases from the more than 10,000 spent fuel rods stored in unprotected pools near the damaged reactors. It took five days after the earthquake, notes the independent report, for Japanese officials to confirm that the pools were still filled with water and thus safe.

Not surprisingly, the independent report conflicts greatly with the government’s own official investigation into the accident, which was released as Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology in America, which outlined how a new and Orwellian public relations-oriented language spoken by nuclear developers had evolved. Nukespeak is a language of evasion and euphemism, of minimizing and sanitizing, and of public relations and promotion. It is a language where catastrophes are rendered harmless by sterile words; and where an “accident” can never happen, since it is instead defined as an event, an incident, an abnormal evolution, a normal aberration, or a plant transient… Nukespeak takes its cues and techniques from the worlds of advertising, sales and marketing, since it too is blatantly aimed at selling us something we don’t need –and which in this case would otherwise be deemed dangerous and foolhardy.

Nukespeak is the language of the nuclear mindset — the world view, or system of beliefs of nuclear developers. The word mindset means what it implies, a mind that is already set. A mindset acts like a filter, sorting information and perceptions, allowing some to be processed and some to be ignored, consciously or unconsciously. Nukespeak encodes the beliefs and assumptions of the nuclear mindset; the language and the mindset continuously reinforce each other. Repeat after them: nuclear power is safe and cheap, green and clean…

For decades, the use of Nukespeak and its PR and information-management techniques has consistently distorted the debate over nuclear power. Time and time again — Fukushima is but the latest example — nuclear developers have confused their hopes with reality, publicly presented their expectations and assumptions as facts, covered up damaging information, harassed critics and fired scientists who disagreed with established policy, refused to recognize the existence of problems, generated false or misleading statistics to bolster their assertions, failed to learn from their mistakes, and claimed that there was little choice but to follow their policies.

Before the accident at Three Mile Island, for example, nuclear proponents liked to claim that meltdowns were nearly impossible events, virtually unimaginable. The TMI accident, which began with a sticky valve, proved otherwise. In the end, the plant came within thirty minutes of a full meltdown. And even though the plant operators averted disaster, the reactor vessel was still destroyed and radiation was released into the atmosphere.

But did the nuclear power industry ever learn or act upon the “lessons” of TMI? While it’s true that much has changed in the nuclear field since then, it’s also true that the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same. Nuclear developers worldwide maintain the same culture and ways of thinking, and the same lack of transparency. The same sloppy mix of public relations and industry-dominated regulatory bodies is still the hallmark of the nuclear power industry.

In response to the partial meltdown of three reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi — the world’s third great nuclear plant catastrophe, following TMI and the far-worse meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986 — we issued a Second Edition of our book, now called Nukespeak: The Selling of Nuclear Technology from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima.

In preparing a new edition, we were amazed to find that no matter where we looked today, we found striking and alarming continuations of the effects of what we had earlier labeled the nuclear mindset, and of a self-contained world where “nothing can go wrong” because we are supposedly under the protection of a savvy nuclear priesthood of risk-managing engineers, nuclear deterrence strategists, unquestioning military officers, subservient regulatory officials, classification specialists, nonproliferation inspectors, and steely politicians — the same people who once promised us energy “too cheap to meter,” produced in plants whose designers would foresee everything that could go wrong and then engineer redundant safety systems that would prevent any serious problems.

Looking back over the record of the decades from the Manhattan Project of World War II to last year’s triple meltdown at Fukushima, the nuclear mindset must be judged wanting in every respect. The accident at Fukushima — like those at TMI and Chernobyl before it — should only remind us again that, in spite of their allegedly redundant “defense-in-depth” design safety features, and constant reassurances that nothing can go wrong, nuclear power plants have repeatedly failed, sometimes with extremely costly and deadly consequences. Attempts to correct past errors have led to huge increases in the price tags of new plants, making them so expensive that only massive government subsidies and guarantees keep the nuclear industry afloat. Meanwhile, the cost of renewable sources of electricity continues to fall, and investments in energy efficiency provide far higher rates of return than those in nuclear plants.

Before Fukushima, nuclear proponents had taken to calling the rush of state-subsidized orders for new plants a “nuclear renaissance,” and hailed nuclear power as a supposedly “clean and green” means of combating climate change by reducing the need to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity. Despite the industry’s dismal history and lackluster present, however, many governments around the world — including those of China and the United States, where President Obama, other leading Democrats, and the leaders of the Republican opposition in Congress are all united on the issue — continue their insane push to build new plants. Yet amidst this boosterism, neither governments nor utilities have put forth a solution to the intractable problem of what to do with the many tons of radioactive waste these plants have already generated thus far. These dangerous materials are now stored on-site, turning every nuclear plant in the world into a de facto high-level radioactive waste dump — and a tempting target for terrorists.

Fortunately, the scale and staggering cost of the Fukushima accident has begun to break down the nuclear mindset in at least some parts of the world. Although U.S. regulators have downplayed the risks of the dozens of American reactors of the same flawed design as the plants at Fukushima, officials in other countries have already reacted with radical changes in their energy strategies. In Japan, regulators have temporarily shut down all but two plants. And in Germany (with the world’s fourth largest economy), where the government had issued a controversial decision in the fall of 2010 to extend the licenses of the country’s aging nuclear plants, Prime Minister Angela Merkel reversed course and pledged to shut down all of the country’s nuclear reactors by 2022.

History has shown that we can and should expect more examples of the misuse and abuse of language by Japanese nuclear officials over the coming months – and even years. Although major nuclear accidents like that of Fukushima thankfully happen only rarely, they never end. The recent 25th “anniversary” of the Chernobyl accident, where hundreds of millions of dollars have been pledged to build a “sarcophagus” to entomb the radioactive waste still there, should serve us all as a stark reminder. Nuclear developers are still incapable of “imagining the unimaginable” (such as the 100 foot tsunami wave that blasted over the forty foot protective seawalls near Fukushima) precisely because they lack the language, and thus even the concepts, with which to express the reality that nuclear power is neither safe nor cheap, but an expensive, dangerous and outmoded form of technology that threatens us all. If we don’t soon learn and take to heart the lessons of Fukushima — and of Chernobyl before it, and Three Mile Island before that — there is no reason to mark the first anniversary of the accident there with anything other than ever-growing alarm.

Filed Under: Nuclear energy, nuclear power, Nukespeak Tagged With: nuclear, nuclear power, Nukespeak, social media

Rush Limbaugh: Taking shock one step too far

March 11, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

Listening Post on Al Jazeera is one of my favorite media programs in the world. This week LP and its energetic host Richard Gizbert look at “the Republican media machine” and how the Limbaugh controversy could impact the coming presidential election. I’m pleased to be included as a commentator once again, so please check it out.

Here’s a program summary:

“He has made a living from speaking his mind. But this time round, Rush Limbaugh, the US radio talk show host, may have taken his conservative rants one step too far. Last week, the right-wing shock jock led an on-air, all-out verbal assault on Sandra Fluke, who had argued before Congress that contraception should be covered by health insurance.

This week, advertisers pulled out of his show en masse, despite a rare apology from Limbaugh for the words he had unleashed. And while Barack Obama, the US president, chose to speak up, Republican candidates decided to keep their heads down, weary of upsetting one of the most powerful right-wing media voices in the US – as the countdown to the presidential elections creeps up.

This week’s News Divide takes a look at a controversy within the Republican media machine and the impact it may have on the US presidential election. Has Limbaugh unintentionally harmed the party he backs?

In our Internet Video of the Week, we feature one of the smartest and most prolific online animators around, Mark Fiore. With the US primaries rumbling on, it was only right that he would weigh in with his take on it. In the latest video, “Leader’s”, he summarises what the candidates are talking about – personal lives and timeshares – as opposed to the big issues like economy and war, that they should be talking about.

Listening Post can be seen each week at the following times GMT: Saturday: 0830, 1930; Sunday: 1430; Monday: 0430.http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/03/201239101841433193.html

Filed Under: Uncategorized

#january 25 One Year Later: Social Media & Politics 3.0

January 24, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

One year ago, a revolution began in Egypt that still reverberates there — as well as among other repressive rulers and regimes in Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and beyond, including thousands of miles away in New York City, where “Occupy Wall Street” protests in turn took root and then flowered into literally hundreds of similar protests all around the nation and the world. From Tunis to Tahrir Square — but also from London, Madrid and Rome to Athens, Tel Aviv and Tokyo — millions were on the march, demanding more respect, hope, dignity and democracy.

What if anything did it all have to do with the rise of social media?

Many observers, including most prominently U.S. President Barack Obama, proclaimed that social media had in fact played a key role in events, particularly in Egypt, where strongman Hosni Mubarak’s regime was toppled. Writing for the Reuters news agency, for example, Philip N. Howard, author of The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam, noted, “It was social media that spread both the discontent and inspiring stories of success…into the Middle East.”

Months later, after analyzing more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, Howard and other scholars at the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam published a study claiming “social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.” Howard, an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington, said the evidence “suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising. People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”

During the week before Mubarak’s resignation, for example, the rate of tweets about political change in Egypt increased ten-fold and videos featuring protest and political commentary went viral, with the top two- dozen receiving nearly five and a half million views. The amount of content produced in Facebook and political blogs by opposition groups also increased dramatically. “Among the lessons for the West,” Howard concluded, were the facts that “a larger network of citizens now has political clout, largely because of social media,” and that “democratization has become more about social networks than political change driven by elites.”

Other researchers and scholars, however, are not so sure of the actual role social media played in facilitating the protests. Writing on nextgov.com, a web site devoted to “technology and the business of government,” Joseph Marks reported that although experts were in agreement that, “Something extraordinary happened at the nexus of social media and political action during the Arab spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa…[but] just what happened is less clear.” While Twitter and other social media had become a megaphone disseminating information about the uprisings to the outside world, Marks said, “a comprehensive study of Tweets about the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings” found that more than 75 percent of people who clicked on embedded Twitter links related to the uprisings were from outside the Arab world.

Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation at the U.S. State Department, supported the idea that social media had played a determinant role in the Arab Spring. Ross said the use of social media during the uprisings signaled the beginning of a “massive transfer of power from nation states and large institutions to individual and small institutions.” Other observers warned, however, that, “data on the role of social media during the Arab spring is so disparate and confusing it is nearly impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from it.”

Cyber-Realists Vs. Cyber-Utopians

The ongoing controversy over whether and to what extent social media helped create the democratic surge of the Arab Spring brought to the fore earlier disagreements between “cyber-utopians” and more skeptical “cyber-realists” such as Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Gladwell’s New Yorker article, headlined Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, created a storm of reaction –- most of it negative — when it was published three months before the Egyptian uprising.

“The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution,” Gladwell had written. “The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns.” Gladwell was convinced that those he derided as “digital evangelists” had, at the very least, vastly overstated the impact of social media on the new wave of political activism.

Gladwell remembered derisively that former U.S. national-security adviser Mark Pfeifle had called for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and had said, “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy.” Gladwell also recalled former US State Department official James K. Glassman telling a crowd of activists that sites like Facebook “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These were “strong, and puzzling, claims,” Gladwell said. After all, “Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet?” Like Morozov, he believed “Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution” was impossible since very few Twitter accounts exist there. As for Iran, the people “tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West.”

Writing in Foreign Policy, Radio Free Europe correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari supported Gladwell’s conclusion. “Simply put: there was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran,” Esfandiari stated forthrightly. Twitter’s impact inside Iran was nil, she believed, as did the manager of one of the Internet’s most popular Farsi-language websites, Mehdi Yahyanejad, whom Esfandiari quoted as saying, “Here [in the United States,] there is lots of buzz. But once you look, you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.” Those who disagreed, Esfandiari continued, were lazy and uninformed. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching? —people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

In reaction to the spate of claims that the protests in Tunisia and Egypt were also Twitter or alternately, Facebook-inspired, Evgeny Morozov decried “cyber-utopians” who believe “the Arab spring has been driven by social networks.” In a post for the UK Guardian, Morozov argued that they “ignore the real-world activism underpinning them.”

Like Gladwell, Morozov is convinced, “The current fascination with technology-driven accounts of political change in the Middle East is likely to subside, for a number of reasons.” Accounts of the revolutions that emphasize the liberating role of social media tools function mostly to “make Americans feel proud of their own contribution to events in the Middle East. After all, the argument goes, such a spontaneous uprising wouldn’t have succeeded before Facebook was around – so Silicon Valley deserves a lion’s share of the credit.” He then added, “Perhaps the outsize revolutionary claims for social media now circulating throughout the west are only a manifestation of western guilt for wasting so much time on social media: after all, if it helps to spread democracy in the Middle East, it can’t be all that bad to while away the hours ‘poking’ your friends and playing FarmVille.”

Social networks, these naysayers claim, are ill-suited to real-world activism and high-risk strategies such as those employed during Arab Spring – “boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations” – because they are messy, non-hierarchical, and cannot provide the necessary discipline and strategy. When taking on a powerful and organized establishment, Gladwell declared, “You have to be a hierarchy.”

The explanation for the fury of change, however, is more nuanced than either of the dueling cyber-camps is willing to admit, as a closer examination of the protests seems to suggest. In the North Africa/Middle East region, a pan-Arab collaboration of young activists skilled in the use of technology did in fact given birth to a new movement dedicated to spreading democracy. They were strategic and disciplined, even as they shied from hierarchy. They relied not only on tactics of nonviolent resistance but also those of marketing borrowed from Silicon Valley. Tunisians and Egyptians did share expertise and experiences with similar youth movements in Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Iran. “Tunis is the force that pushed Egypt, but what Egypt did will be the force that will push the world,” Walid Rachid, one of the members of the April 6 Youth Movement, which helped organize the protests that set off the Arab Spring, explained to the New York Times.

That being said, it is also true that both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts were literally decades in the making. Speaking in June 2011 at the eighth annual Personal Democracy Forum, a procession of young Arab activists who had all been intimately involved in the spring revolts, explained the process of how they and millions of supporters were “weaving a network for change” in their countries, and what role the emerging media played in making that happen. From Riadh Guerfali to Dr. Rasha Abdulla to Mona Eltahawy to Alaa Abdel Fattah, they noted the Arab Spring actions were emphatically not “Twitter” or “Facebook” revolutions that had coalesced online, but were instead the outcome of decades of networked resistance offline.

At the same time, they said, the revolts were clearly facilitated, and to some extent accelerated, by the decentralized organizing power of the new social media. The results of this offline/online action mashup were surprisingly successful revolutions that overthrew long-entrenched political forces. As Alaa Abdel Fattah pointed out, the roots of the revolution in Egypt went back as far as 1972 and efforts made by his parents’ generation. Ultimately, he explained, they had been stymied by a clever power structure that painstakingly divided and thus conquered the protesters, marginalizing some and buying others off with favor and access. Decades later, Fattah pointed out, the emerging social media suddenly made it possible “to make noises louder online, to build local movements with one narrative and then build them online to a mass movement.” As another speaker at the forum, Omoyele Sowore, explained, “The Internet has helped revolution; but the Internet is not revolution.”

(Note: My new book, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media Is Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, will be published April 1 by City Lights Books.)

Filed Under: Arab spring, Egypt revolution, social media Tagged With: Arab Spring, Egypt revolution, social media

Friends, Followers and the Future

January 20, 2012 By Media Is A Plural Leave a Comment

There’s a revolution going on, as ever-accelerating developments in digital information technologies change nearly every aspect of how we live, work, play, do business, and engage in politics. Share and share alike—the numbers say it all as billions of people worldwide flock to online media and use social networks to discover and spread news and information.

In the process, ever-growing networks of “ordinary people” are using these powerful new tools to trim the influence long held by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Media. No longer just passive recipients, participants in social networks now regularly make and break news while organizing civic and political actions that bypass censors, outpace traditional media, attract massive audiences, and influence the rise and fall of brands, industries, politicians, and even governments.

In my forthcoming look at how social media are transforming our world, Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media Are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media, I explain the trends and explore what tech visionaries, media makers, political advisers, and businesspeople are saying about the meteoric rise of the various social networks of friends and followers, and what they bode for our future.

Here’s what some savvy media and academic observers are already saying about me and Friends, Followers and the Future:

“Rory O’Connor is one of the smartest media guys around. He knows who’s spinning, who’s pandering, and who’s putting money in his own pocket at the expense of logic, reason, and the public good.”—Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair media critic

“This is a timely book about a vital subject: How do we get information and is it reliable? If you want to understand the future of news, its opportunities and its pitfalls, read this book.” — Ken Auletta, author and New Yorker media writer

“This is a book in the know with ideas that we will all need to know as we navigate our personal and collective futures.” — Danny Schechter, News Dissector.com

“This book is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and fair-minded survey of how social media are conveying — and perhaps transforming — what we want to know.” — Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education and author, most recently, of Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed

I’m proud that my publisher is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s famed City Lights of San Francisco!

ISBN-10 0872865568
ISBN-13 9780872865563
Publication Date April 2012
List Price $13.95

Filed Under: journalism, social media Tagged With: brands, journalism, mainstream media, social media

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