“Social media\u00a0are media designed to be disseminated through social
\ninteraction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing
\ntechniques.” wikipedia<\/p>\n
Revolutionaries in the past have used new media technologies to gain
\nadvantage in their struggles, in 1916 in Dublin, Morse code was used
\nto communicate prior to and during the easter rising. In France in
\n1968 the mintel system was used to relay messages between
\nuniversities. Social Media has the potential to link the mass of the
\nworking class to real time information about struggles where the state
\nor private medias fail.<\/p>\n
In recent times Social Media has hit the headlines of the capitalist
\npress in the story of how the US Administration influenced Twitter who
\nwere due to shut down, to stay on in the vital hours after the
\ndisputed Iranian elections, allowing communication between those who
\nopposed the result. Social Media as it is known today has its origins
\nin the US military from the Arpanet system a wired network between
\nmilitary installations, myth has it that it was for the aftermath of a
\nnuclear war, the Arpanet turned into the Internet through educational
\nfacilities adoption of USENET bulletin boards and then the World Wide
\nWeb in the early 1990’s.<\/p>\n
Modern Social Media sites such as facebook twitter and youtube are
\nsimple to use for any basic computer user and mask all the technology
\nin easy to use widgets and applications. This simplification of
\ncomplex underlying technologies has allowed for millions of users
\nworld wide to take part in this new media, facebook has a active user
\nbase of 300 million with others like twitter and youtube some where
\nbehind that, to put those figures into context the population of the
\nworlds third biggest country is the USA at 307 million.<\/p>\n
Although the primary function of social media is to socialise with
\npeers, there is an increasing trend towards other uses such as citizen
\njournalism, this is where the general public can report on events with
\nthe same equality as state or private media journalists.<\/p>\n
Wikipedia is a great example of how in social media we can trust each
\nother to create a knowledge base that is free from bias or\u00a0commercial
\ninfluence, simply funded by user donation the foundation runs with a
\nsmall full time staff and thousands of voluntary contributors.<\/p>\n
In struggles past such as the water charges in the 1990’s,
\ncommunications was a vital tool in the days when disconnections were
\ntaking place, mobile phone use was\u00a0still a luxury of the yuppies. We
\nadapted old CB radio\u00a0technology with FM pirate radio to chase council
\nvans around south county Dublin, by the time of the Bin Tax struggles
\nmobile phones were common among the working class and this helped
\ntrack waste disposal trucks around the city. In future struggles the
\ntechnology of social media will help us build better comunications
\namonst the working class, imagine a scenario\u00a0where a truck is spotted
\nand a single press of a button a phone application sends the GPS
\ncoordinates to a web based application that maps all the recorded
\nsightings giving a better picture of what is going on. The is not
\nscience fiction these technologies are available today on most middle
\nrange phones.<\/p>\n
The other benefits we can leverage from social media is its power to
\nbring people together in groups where they can discuss and organise
\nwithout having to be physically being present at a meeting. In the
\npast year at public meetings the Socialist Party in Ireland has
\nadopted the use of live video streaming on the web from a mobile
\nphone, the has allowed between 5 and 10\u00a0percent\u00a0of the\u00a0audience\u00a0to not
\nhave to be\u00a0psychically\u00a0present at the meeting. The use of new social
\nmedia tools during the election of Joe Higgins was a great step
\nforward and no doubt this new media helped the Socialist Party reach
\nnew voters they had never reached in the past with more traditional
\nstyled electioneering.<\/p>\n
In the same European election a new party in Sweden the Pirate Party
\nwon two seats, this party was born out of a social media peer to peer
\nfile sharing site “the pirate bay” this organisation has grown to be
\nthe second biggest party in Sweden based on membership and collects
\nsubs from member via premium SMS messages.<\/p>\n
Social media is not the next internet fad it has already shaped the
\nway we watch TV via sites like youtube, how listen to music through
\nsites like blip.fm and last.fm where old school values like the DJ or
\nthe\u00a0ad break\u00a0have given way to user driven content selection. The
\nmodels of these two huge pillars in the media industry which have been
\nstatic for the last 50 years, are seeing revolutionary change, its
\ntime for socialists to follow the lead that James Connolly gave back
\nin 1916 embracing new technologies that helps communicate the ideas of
\nsocialism in the workers movement.<\/p>\n
text by D\u00f3nal Greene .2009 published with permission. copying is ok.<\/p>\n
Posted via email<\/a> from web lab<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Social media\u00a0are media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” wikipedia Revolutionaries in the past have used new media technologies to gain advantage in their struggles, in 1916 in Dublin, Morse code was used to communicate prior to and during the easter rising. In France in 1968… Continue reading social media and revolution<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2309,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/2309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briangreene.com\/bhg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}