My role in the debate was to assess the positions of both sides of the arguments and provide a result to who had the better rebuttal in the end. In order to do so I had to keep an open mind when reading through Dean’s article “Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism”. When providing a result for a debate, you must take down important points for each side in preparation. When doing this I found that I had more points down for how social media inhibits sociopolitical change, this may have been because Dean’s article was ultimately very negative in relation to technology and the media although, when listening to the other side of the debate I was persuaded to think that social media has a strong influence in enabling socio-political change. They brought up points about the incredible #MeToo movement that went above and beyond to produce actual change and it started out online by people who created awareness of the issue. Their points about how the internet provides a faster and easier way to promote change with a large number of users, more that could ever be apart of a protest, stood out to me as well as change requires many voices. The only point I found that went against their statement was when they mentioned that memes encourage awareness for socio-political change. This kind of entertainment media is not something that can promote vast change in any political aspect as people can’t take the real issue seriously or even gain knowledge on it when watching a silly meme on Twitter. Ultimately, I agree with how the majority of social media can promote socio-political change by creating awareness but we ended up favouring the other side of the debate because of the examples they provided and how they communicated their argument.
When listening to the other debate of the Castell’s article I found it a bit easier to make a decision when regarding social media and socio-political change. Their arguments discussed a narrower topic than the Dean debate, the Egyptian Revolution. Because we watched The Square in class and had knowledge on the subject already, it was a bit more interesting to follow along when our classmates were debating. In the end, I sided with how socio-political change enables political change because of the amount of positive change that happened in Egypt from posting online and gathering awareness. They dethroned two dictators that were ruining the country from the numbers that they generated in protest and online.
I found this debate incredibly eye-opening and a valuable exercise to gain knowledge on both sides of the argument for social media and socio-political change when studying media studies.
Works Cited
Castells, Manuel. “The Egyptian Revolution.” Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed., 2015.
Dean, Jodi. “Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism.” Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Duke University Press, 2009.