As social media becomes increasingly ubiquitous in today’s culture and political climate, it is critical that we assess its efficacy in affecting sociopolitical change. In preparation for the in-class debate on this very topic, I was responsible for assessing Manuel Castells’s The Egyptian Revolution (2015). Furthermore, it was required that I make a case in favour of the aforementioned resolution. Going into this exercise, it was already my belief that social media could, in fact engender sociopolitical change, and given that it was my role to defend such a belief, I consequently read the assigned chapter in search of information which affirmed this position. Those in opposition of this argument made several strong points, such as social media’s extraneousness to the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, thus causing me to analyze social media’s effectiveness more critically. However, my overall perspective remained largely unchanged after this debate. Following the second debate regarding The Promises of Communicative Capitalism (Dean 2009) however, my perspective on social media’s ability to affect sociopolitical change shifted slightly. The Egyptian Revolution (Castells 2015) focused primarily on social media’s ability to form networks and connectivity among protesters as well its ability to provide protesters with a platform to share their uncensored opinions. While Dean concedes this is true, she addresses how merely stating one’s opinion online is not an effective means of protest. She develops this point further by stating that in the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, “the terabytes of commentary and information, then, did not indicate a debate”, but instead got lost in the masses of circulating content and “cultural effluvia” that fills the online space. (Dean 2009). As a result, though social media provides a platform for people to call out an issue, it does very little in the way of solving said issue. This point was made very clearly in the second debate and resonated with me greatly. Therefore, while I retain that social media is an effective tool for protest insofar as it provides the infrastructure to callout social and political issues, I now believe that social media alone cannot affect sociopolitical change.
Works cited
Castells, Manuel. “The Egyptian Revolution.” Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed., Wiley, 2015.
Dean, Jodi. “Technology: The Promises of Communicative Capitalism.” Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Duke University Press, 2009.