The People We Become

Facebook for Global Protest: The Potential and Limits of

Social Software for Grassroots Activism (Session 6)

Reference

Raffl, Christina Neumayer1 and Celina. Facebook for Global Protest: The Potential and Limits of. Referred Paper, Salzburg: 1ICT&S Center, University of Salzburg, 2008.

Thesis

Social software has aided political movements, awareness and other social benefits through participation, and discussion on the internet. The software can be configured to determine the structure and design of the internet. The author discusses the privileges social software offer and a few drawbacks like inequality.

Main Theme

The virtual space is a hierarchical, decentralized and open architecture that enables social movements (Raffl 2008). Social Networking has been the major contribution to global awareness and contribution. The social software provides opportunity for participation in political activism, and global protests that eventually results in global change in the real life. Facebook is one of the biggest social networking site, and about 70 million active users (Raffl 2008). This social environment is created to make and interact with friends, and meet new people through chat rooms, emails etc (Raffl 2008). In 2008, 0ver 500,000 people responded to a single Facebook post calling for a protest against the FARC, which had been discriminated for unethical activities in the political regime (Raffl 2008). The social movement was initiated online by an engineer by name. Oscar Morales and was manifested in real life (Raffl 2008). Howard Rheingold, author of Virtual Communities (1993), reacted negatively to anti-FARC rallies by blogging “From Facebook to the streets of Columbia” (Raffl 2008).

Although the internet allows equal participation, lack of computer skills, internet connection, and political literacy are limitation, especially in the developing world (Raffl 2008). In Columbia, only about one-fifth of the population have regular internet...