Thinking back on course material, it seems that protests have been mentioned a lot. Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, Arab Spring, Occupy Oakland. The common factor is human rights and individuals serving as advocates for them. Also, I suppose, is the common factor of social media and the Internet, as this is usually the medium by which we learn about these things and communicate about these things, as did Asma Mahfouz when she recruited her fellow protesters for Tahrir Square.
The Internet and, often more specifically, social media facilitate global communication. The Internet is almost always the medium by which advocates for causes communicate their opinions, organize themselves, create petitions that can potentially be distributed to millions of people, and inform and educate people willing to learn about the issues facing their own society on a local, national or global level.
The advertising industry has removed our ability to make informed decisions, without biased information, independently and knowingly. Because of advertising and the use of it, as encouraged and enabled by Edward Bernays (creator of public relations), the industry developed an ability to manipulate our desires and our purchases. Social media is allowing us to get this power back.
I came across this image in my search. This picture illustrates the significant of social media and the potential that it has to influence us. This illustration has some pretty significant evidence hidden within its content, and also makes it obvious the role that social media allows us, as consumers and citizens, to have in our economy. For example, 14% of people trust advertisements, while 78% of consumers trust peer reviews, which they frequently receive from blogs and other social media sites such as facebook and twitter. So if 34% of bloggers post about products and services, and we are exposed to this content every day through search engines and our involvement with social media, does this mean that the industry of advertising will become obsolete? Or does this mean that The Persuaders (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/) will simply evolve their strategies, as they have already began to do, to influence the communications of these bloggers, or to make their messages appear as if they are "user generated content"? I think so.
So social media is the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? That's definitely debatable. However, it's a debate that is over my head. I'll do my best. Let the blabbering begin...
So the Industrial Revolution was essentially the point in history when we became obsessed with efficiency. This movement was drive by mechanization and likely can be pinpointed on that technology timeline that we mentioned earlier. The Industrial Revolution changed everything. Obviously. The Internet changed everything as well. But has the extension of social media to the Internet been a bigger shift? I would argue yes. At the inception of the Internet we were simply given the ability to search information that was presented by those willing and able to invest the money into creating the content. Now, with blogs and social media, everyone can communicate their opinions for free, and everyone can read those opinions for free. This has removed the tendency of information to only be supplied when one party has such a vested interest in the well-being of that idea, product or company that they decided to communicate it. Social media has made this communication so easy that we don't feel it is insignificant to talk about products we tried, places we ate, movies we watched and more significantly, to present greater society with information that it important, affects them, and that they would otherwise have no way of knowing. Companies aren't going to post on the Internet bad things about themselves. Government isn't going to post bad things about itself. Government isn't going to post bad things about companies that are supporting them financially. This brings us to the self interest of government and corporations and to the inevitable conflict of interest that arises when they are allowed to work together.
Without social media, the Internet would be censored.
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