3Facebook and Twitter enabled the Arab Spring.
Five Myths
A feature from The Post’s Outlook section that dismantles myths, clarifies common misconceptions and makes you think again about what you thought you already knew.
Even if social-media networks provide activists with new tools to combat repression, they rarely direct social movements — particularly because they don’t necessarily drive people onto the streets. While I was in Egypt this summer, citizens explained why they flocked to protests early this year. Their stories focused on hardship and grievances; admiration of the Tunisian revolution; and the power of “street networks,” or the techniques used by mosques, unions and community organizers to rally people in the working class, almost none of whom use social media. (Less than 5 percent of Egypt’s population uses Facebook, and less than 1 percent uses Twitter.) Some Egyptian bloggers explained to me that they came to Tahrir Square only after the Mubarak regime hit the “kill switch” on the Internet; they also described unsuccessful protests they tried to organize on Facebook. In addition, activists explained that governments can use social media to monitor dissidents, infiltrate movements and spread propaganda.
That said, social media has indirect effects on mobilizing people, including the ability to organize the networks of key activists and shape news coverage. Egyptian TV journalists said to me that they often source stories from Twitter and circulate videos originally shot on mobile phone and disseminated via video-sharing sites.
4Only young people use social media.
Social media appeals to people of all ages in the Western world, where the most reliable data is available. In the United States, 60 percent of Facebook users are at least 35, and the average age of a Twitter user is now 39 — meaning that many people who were not exposed to the Internet until their 20s are now a big part of its user base. Two-thirds of all American adults use social-networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center, and a 2010 study found that 42 percent of Americans over age 50 are social-media users.
The growth of mobile phone and video-sharing technology mirrors this trend. A recent Pew study found that smartphone users in the United States text and share media across all ages, though youth do so more often.
5Social media creates a global village.
We’ve long heard that the Internet was supposed to unite people of different cultural and political persuasions. Yet, despite the explosion of online voices, social-media users rarely access opinions that differ from their own, and many social-media sites — with their bifurcated like/dislike, join/don’t join ethos — only perpetuate the sound-bite culture of older media.
Not only are our Facebook friends similar to us (we usually connect through mutual friends and shared interests), but researcher Ethan Zuckerman has shown that the sites we visit reaffirm our political and cultural preconceptions. This homogenization reaches the very machinery of social media — its algorithms — which tailor search results or Facebook feeds according to what the systems “think” users will find most interesting.
Bridging disparate cultural and political backgrounds remains a challenge for social media. To learn from differing viewpoints, the technologies and cultures of social media must evolve so that they bring people together rather than keeping us in digital silos.
Ramesh Srinivasan is an assistant professor of information studies and design/media arts at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is on Twitter at @rameshmedia.
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