Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, December 31, 2010

Social media and civil society

I'm told (correct me if I'm wrong) that a rubric for an FRQ on last year's AP exam did not allow using social media as an example of civil society. I wasn't there and I didn't read exams, so my inclination to include social media in civil society doesn't mean much.

Clay Shirky, professor of New Media at NYU, writing in Foreign Affairs, offers an argument that social media are part of civil society, but perhaps not in the way you might think at first. [Summary: Discussion of the political impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. In fact, social media's real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere -- which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.]

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And, oh, yes, Happy New Year.

The Political Power of Social Media

On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk." The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila.

The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week -- so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented. Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was gone…

As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated publics demand change...

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Labels: civil society, concepts, technology