To assume that a technology could be responsible for empowering thousands of people across several countries to risk their lives in protest is naïve. Politicians and pundits who celebrate the power of the Internet to create democracy are seriously overlooking social, cultural and political factors that shape our societies and our actions. In short, there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution or a Facebook revolution. But what cannot be denied is that social media can be a powerful communication and information tool and as such can empower communities to make change of they have the motivation to do so. Motiviation seems to be the biggest factor: if you give someone a hammer they may build, destroy or more likely, leave it to rust in the garage. As a teacher, motivating my students to use these tools effectively will be a huge challenge. Unless people are unhappy with their status quo, unless people are more inclined to challenge systems rather than passively go along with them, they will not use social media to organise resistance – they will use it for entertainment and personal communication. Access to and engagement with social media technologies is far from universal – to assume that having mobile phones will prevent genocide form happening in your country is ridiculous, as the people of Southern Sudan and the Tamils of Sri-Lanka will attest. Governments have a bigger job on their hands than just providing broadband to every house, hut or treehouse across the world because having access to the Internet will not automatically change attitudes.
The most useful analogy of the media landscape is Jon Naughton’s Media Ecosystem. He defines an ecosystem as having organisms that
“prey on one another; compete for food and other nutrients; have parasitic or symbiotic relationships . . . And an ecosystem is never static. The system may be in equilibrium at any given moment, but the balance is precarious.”
I propose that the boom in the use of social media has upset this equilibrium – this seemingly dominant communications technology is competing for the consumer’s attention, in some cases to the detriment of other technologies. There is indeed a symbiotic relationship between old media and new media as established newspapers and channels work out how much they value and pay attention to the social media world and organisations like Hope not Hate campaign across digital and analogue platforms. The changes to the media ecosystem as a result of the introduction of these technologies may well prove to be slight in terms of social revolution but the use of social media to a create networks of people working towards a simple objective may be the strongest new organism to emerge. Certainly it is an element of my research that will inform my future teaching practice.
