Socially Acceptable Media

Over the past few years we’ve seen an almost explosive growth in social media and networking.  In previous articles we’ve looked at Twitter and Facebook – undoubtedly two of the bigger players in the scene – but in recent months we’ve begun to see a widening of path of these types of sites.

In mid-2007 I remember signing up to follow then Presidential candidate John Edwards on Twitter – there were very few followers then, in fact I think it was barely 1000.  As I recall, Edwards was one of the first political figures to embrace the technology – keeping supporters updated on the state of his campaign, and on his battle for the issues.  While the Edwards campaign was doomed, it’s use of technology was embraced by the other candidates.  President Obama, followed the Edwards model and constantly kept his supporters engaged and involved, and using social networking like Twitter, and social media such as YouTube, found a cost effective way to distribute a message – and through link sharing among supporters, caused that message to go viral on the web.  I think that the campaign’s ability to embrace technology allowed them to reach my younger voters where they live – on the web – and could have been one of the tipping points for his candidacy.

In this year though, we’ve seen even more examples of how this aggregation of technology can be its own agent for change.  The most glaring example are the election protests in Iran earlier this summer.  Protesters were using Twitter to report on the protests using their mobile phones and uploading video and still photos to sites like YouTube and Flickr and Twitpic.  In the first days of the protest, Twitter ended up being the source that broke the news of the protests, while conventional media kept trying to play catch up.  I think the moment I knew Twitter had arrived was during these protests when CNN ran a Twitter feed on the crawl across the lower third of their screen.

The health care reform fight in the United States is also taking advantage of this social media aggregation.  For weeks we’ve seen the embarrassing protests at town hall meetings – where people who are placed at the meetings to be disruptive are squelching actual healthy debate; making it appear that there is more of a resistance to the programs than there actually is.  Now however, as the congress prepares to come back into session, the same technology is turning the tables the other way.  Sensible Americans on both sides of the issue are realizing that these disruptive protestors are harming the democracy they say they’re fighting for, and the latest viral media to be shared via Twitter and Facebook are videos of Barney Frank and of Jon Stewart, taking these people to task and daring them to have an intelligent and informed discussion.

As time marches on, mankind finds newer technologies to both broadcast a message and initiate a dialog – scrolls, books, newspapers, radio, and television; every generation seems to develop its own tool.  It makes one wonder if microblogging on Twitter is really all that far removed from the cave paintings of primitive man?