Social Media and the revolution

Mashable offers an article entitled "4 Ways Social Media is Changing the Non-Profit World" Beth Kanter writes that since 2003, social media is beginning to transform both the ways nonprofits work internally, and how they reach out to a broader range of supporters. The four ways she suggests that social media has changed the non-profit world are as follows:

1) They deepen relationships and engagement

2) They allow individuals and small groups to self-organize

3) They facilitate collaboration and crowd sourcing

4) They create social change within organizations as they flatten hierarchies and make internal processes more efficient

While these claims may be true, and do hold in parts of the Western world, at least on some level, prominent thinkers may disagree with an assessment of social media that is all wine and roses. For example, Clay Shirky writes, "No one believes social media _causes_ otherwise complacent citizens to become angry enough to take to the streets. It’s a convenient straw man for the skeptics, because, as an obviously ridiculous narrative, it’s easy to refute." and Malcolm Gladwell contentiously suggests "the revolution will not be tweeted."

They make these critical claims precisely because whenever a social media platform has been held up as a cause of revolution or dramatic social change, journalists often fail to mention the important human actions and activities outside of social media use. For example, in the recent uprising in Egypt, revolution was facilitated early on not by Twitter, but by the fact that revolutionaries were lighting themselves on fire for their cause. Or as Gladwell rightly mentions, it is ideological fervour, not social media, that leads to revolution.

It is also true to say that despite the very important good things that social media brings to the table (the list outlined by Mashable is probably an accurate portrayal of social media's positives), people were engaging in important activism long before the internet using the tools they had available to them. And the tools people used in the past were no less effective for creating action than the tools we have now. In fact, some could argue that the television was the most powerful tool for mobilizing people on world issues, since it was the first medium that truly connected the world in a visceral way. They would say that social media is not really new, and rather is an extension of what television was already doing.

I tend to agree with these critics because while it is easy to lie back and laud social media as the "killer app" that will make everything easier for both traditional business, nonprofit organizations and revolutionaries alike, it is much more difficult, but also important to take a critical look at social media. When we do this, we can see that while social media do play a role in facilitating communication in many situations, they do so as part of a much broader communication environment that must include traditional media and other less technologized actions and forms of communication.


It is easy when we are first learning about social media to see it as something that solves all our communication problems, but it is not simply that. It is rather, a tool that offers as many challenges as opportunities, and if we are not aware of potential challenges, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.