Originally developed as a way for Harvard students to find out who was dating whom, Facebook has advanced across collegiate networks and across oceans. When we thought Facebook was the ultimate social networking site, Twitter came along, and has 175 million users (as of September 2010). The world reached, according to the U.N. International Telecommunications Union, 1.6 trillion sent text messages (that’s 200,000 texts per second). While Facebook, Twitter, and texting are widely used as procrastination methods in the United States, they are vectors of political change in other areas of the world.
In 2001, a protest in the Philippines to bring down corrupt president Joseph Estrada was coordinated partially by a mass text message sent that read, “Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk," according to Foreign Affairs journal. EDSA stood for Epifianio de los Santos Avenue, a major road in the capital of Manila. Three days later, the president was out of office. Five years later, in 2006, Filipinos received another mass text, this time protesting the inaction of Arroyo’s administration on a chain of unsolved murders and abductions, and the texts read, “WEAR RED. BRING BANNERS,” according to the Washington Post. About 1,000 students converged on an area near the presidential palace at the same time, catching police off guard; their rally made the nightly news.
These protests were made possible by the instantaneous nature of sending electronic messages, but what do you do when the government you’re protesting against cuts off all internet outlets? Getting the message of your out there becomes a challenge, as we have seen in Egypt over the past three weeks. President Hosni Mubarak’s government partially lifted the ban on Internet service, but social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are still inaccessible. The initial ban, though, showed just how afraid Egypt’s administration was of information leaking outside its borders, and it seems like a last-ditch effort to save themselves from having to step down. While the argument can be made that Mubarak’s 30-year reign was an authoritarian one, he did not police internet access the way China’s government has. In fact, China has blocked the word ‘Egypt’ from showing up on the country’s own version of Twitter, called Sina, according to Al-Jazeera. Of all the foes governments face day to day, I never imagined social media outlets would be one of them.
The government couldn’t keep a tight enough grip on the constantly-advancing technological world, though – ‘speak2tweet’, a service made available by Google and SayNow, allows people to call or text a number, and that message would be automatically converted to a ‘tweet’. As much as I am disappointed by distracting myself with social media while I should be studying, I am glad that the services can be manipulated for productive purposes. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter’s new tagline becomes, “Please consider us when organizing your next protest”.
