It is both exciting and enlightening to find that social media sites like MySpace and Facebook aren’t being exclusively used to show off personal preferences, arrange booty calls, and form nonsensical groups like “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head.” These sites are surely changing the way that we interact with issues and politicians, but to what ends? What can we expect from a growing interactive political virtual frontier?
If aspects of this change on the electronic frontier are for the best, as they are purported to be, and this change can aid in picking up some substantial news coverage, perhaps it will first mean that network news can balance intense and somewhat over-eager coverage of internet sex-offenders with a handful of profiles of proactive surfers of the web. Signs of this immediate change can be seen during world events such as the protests and government crackdown in Myanmar where BBC’s World Report and the AP both covered stories about the growth of Facebook groups showing support for the mobilized monks. As of Friday afternoon, a Facebook support group for the monks started-several days ago-has over 110 thousand users. Until Internet to Myanmar on Friday, users of the group based in Burma were posting pictures of the protests, bypassing traditional news organizations, which would then be reported to the papers and BBC.
I wonder, however, how this change will fully manifest itself. I am happy to see so many students coming out in Internet droves that will affect the protests there. Sure, the group is quickly getting pictures-quicker than major network news services-but would this be happening if Facebook was absent from the picture? It’s hard to imagine whether or not they would be hitting the news the way that they are.
The way that Facebook groups can be structured, especially with the backing and support of 110 thousand users online-when they offer pictures to a major news network, the shots are more likely to find their way onto CNN than if sent by an individual, though this can only be speculative.
The place to keep looking, in regards to how social media is affecting our interactions, is to look at how effectively we’re bringing these issues to our politicians and managing proactive change. We see increasing number of electoral politicians, in and pursuing office, making appeals on these websites to be our candidates. One article was written this summer about politicians following the advice of their young staff in pursuing MySpace and Facebook outreach, but trying too hard to control their images and thus failing to completely connect. What will be interesting, and very soon necessary on the basis of expanding and diversifying group of users, is when politicians begin to broaden the issues they address on the Internet and to actually address the issues that their users are bringing to them online, not just distribute well-controlled messages using their MySpace and YouTube accounts.
The advent of “applications,” which are essentially widgets that make Facebook useful, is helping to contribute to bridging these gaps. Applications presently exist to tell users the weather, show quotes from their favorite television shows, and commit to giving money to non-profits and politicians. Applications are making it easier for the groups like the Myanmar support group to function on a tangible level, and they will force politicians to begin responding in a real way. By mobilizing these groups to use applications to send letters to the editor, send letters to politicians, make telephone calls to their Congress people, etc., they will begin to, and in some cases have already begun, to take grass-roots activism and action to a new level that politicians will not long be able to evade by offering carefully crafted campaign messages. The future of these cities is one in which we wont only be better-positioned to stay in touch with old and new friends, but where we will be able to change the world around us for the better, to compound our voices, and to demand a better present and future from our politicians.