The Castells article focuses on the positive ways that social media enables sociopolitical change with the Egyptian Revolution being the key example. He goes through what happened in the revolution and explains the ways that social media was used to the benefit of those participating and fighting for the cause. While reading the piece, it was difficult not to see from Castells’ perspective when he is persuasively writing to make his point, especially because I agreed with some of his points before I read them because I had watched The Square. However, I had to look at what both sides could potentially say because I was on the assessing side and in doing so, I found a few flaws in the article’s argument. I was able to see counter-arguments such as the drowning of voices on big platforms, how easy the internet could be accessible for those who want to sabotage such change, and how the so-called “change” on social media could just talk without action. My perspective didn’t exactly change after the debate but I could see some points for the side against.
My relationship with social media and sociopolitical change has remained, for the most part, the same. I found the documentary The Square to be the most impactful and Castells’ article simply reinforced what I already believed and understood. Listening to the Dean debate did take me out of the Egyptian Revolution to see that maybe the situation that happened in Egypt was a rare case where people’s voices actually did have an impact, compared to Dean’s thoughts that social media creates a space where there are so many voices that no one is taken seriously. It did get me thinking and take the idea of sociopolitical change to my own hands. I find that so many people have important things that need to be seen or spread on social media that never see the light of publicity but when people can come together to talk about the same thing, often the individual voice doesn’t matter. What matters is that there are people that are gathering together to speak out about the same thing and that must count for something.