The social media experiment: Is it tweets or streets?

There is an old saying: where the people are is also where the power is.

This aptly summarises the sense of empowerment that social media accords users.

One just has to look at social media activity – from virtual tribal caucuses to, admittedly, well-meaning groups – to understand the feeling of power that online communities wield, never mind it is a false sense of power.

The growth of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter has transformed the way in which people create and share/exchange information and ideas – which has been accelerated through virtual communities and networks.

Just as social media has evolved, so have social movements.

The clout of web-based activism is in its distributive power, able to reach millions of people in a short time; it injects the same level of credibility that print press accorded social movements in the 20th century, and which it still continues to do.

This phenomenon points to the possibility of social media augmenting efforts by social activists in ways unprecedented before.

The emergence of “Internet Activism” has been given impetus by the global appeal of social media, which has changed the dynamics of online “protest”.

The Internet offers two key traits relevant to activism: reduced costs for creating and organising protests, and the decreased need for activists to be physically together to act together.

Alexander White, writing in The Guardian, disproves the notion that activism is legitimate only where individuals “spend large amounts of time physically in a place to protest against something”.

Digital media, such as social networks, and e-mail “are the twenty first century town square”.

The Arab Spring, for instance, not only came to global prominence because of the assistance of Twitter, Facebook and You Tube, but also because protestors used text messages to engage each other in a virtual civic space.

What critics dismiss as clicktivism, he says, has managed to facilitate some of the biggest protests (such as the Arab revolutions) in modern history, providing “more social capital than any other source”.

But can online activism actually replace offline activism?

The manifest transformative nature of social media, and its expanding global appeal demonstrates the potent power of social media platforms in agitating for change.

Social media revolutions such as the #BringBackOurGirls movement, succeeded in getting thousands of people to sign a petition to demand action from authorities.

But in that instance, the online petition was accompanied by actual street protests, which caught the attention of the world and forced the government to send troops on a rescue mission.

Objectively then, the goals are optimally realised when the two approaches complement each other, never alone.

IMPORTANT ROLE

During the Arab uprisings of early 2011, which saw the overthrow of Presidents Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, it is conceded that digital media played an important role in making the revolution possible – it had the authorities rattled as the Egyptian government attempted to block Internet and mobile phone access in January 2011.

However, the local context in Egypt played an equally important role in complementing the role played by technology-mediated activism.

Egypt had experienced a history of both online and street activism since the early 1990s, supplemented by an independent press, which laid important ground work for the scenes in Tahrir Square in 2011.

Without the foundation laid by the street protests, the Arab Uprisings, and in Egypt in particular, might never have come to fruition.

Likewise, it is noteworthy that in Tunisia, the self-immolation of a street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, in December 2010 in protest for the confiscation of his wares and harassment by a municipal official, was what triggered public anger and violence, leading to the overthrow of President Ben Ali, and inspiring uprisings in other Arab countries.

The link between the revolution and attempts at activism is that while people had been venting through social media, it took one man’s sacrifice to trigger the revolution. Mere coincidence?

Even as SNSs have become important avenues for social activism, they may not necessarily translate into creating the impact, which is what activism seeks to do.

Academician and researcher John Keller, in his journal Culture Comedy Central this #hashtag kills fascists: Does social media activism actually work? observes that “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism”, and that “casting Twitter and Facebook as a catalyst for social and political revolution is a techno-utopian pipe dream”.

He argues that perceived activism and attempts at online revolutions are often started by people who sit in front of their computers and either “like” or “share” pages , without actually going out to “cause” change, which defeats the very purpose of social activism, especially in the increasing instances when no change is realised.

The Social Capital Theory, on whose principles social activism rides, identifies mutual trust and the co-operation that arises from the connections that people forge as the social capital – the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s social interactions.

These are not elements that strangers can create by clicking, liking and sharing; there must be sharing, interacting and creating identities on a level more personal than through a shared computer network.

The writer is a Sub-Editor at Sunday Nation, and a Master’s in Communications student at the University of Nairobi