Cybersociety. week 7

Cybersociety 2012

My thoughts on the article

‘Reading Twitter in Tehran?’

By John Palfrey, Bruce Etling and Robert Faris

21/06/09

A few weeks ago, I did the presentation on twitter and how twitter helps in political causes... This made me  quite interested to know what happened in Iran through twitter.

The authors mentioned that Twitter was crucial in the Iranian Revolution 2009. Twitter as a platform meant that people could not be stopped and controlled any longer. (stated by blogger Andrew Sullivan)

The multi-applications that Twitter is able to run on (which I touched on last week) meant that Twitter is “nearly impossible to block”

But for all the success, there are limitations as well.

The nature of twitter is such that twitter feeds are dynamic; constantly changing due to the updates of many tweets. A tweet is also limited to 140 characters, which makes conciseness a problem.

How are people going to pay attention or even take notice of tweets that are aplenty in the cyberworld? There needs to be more of a ‘oomph’ factor in making sure the global audience reads your tweet.

Also, anyone can tweet. People dissatisfied with the current political or economic situation can take their grouses to the cyberworld. Hoever, government agencies and officials can simply take to the social platform to clear up misunderstandings, feed propaganda etc. Well, if it doesn’t work out, they can always threaten to lock up people in jails for opposing their ‘national agendas’.

Anyway, there are other social platforms apart from twitter that can be used for political activism.

It is stated in (SCHLESINGER, 2010) that “politicans are using facebook to reach constituents in innovative ways, not just to advertise their policy views, but also for everything from finding new staffers to giving their constituents a look at their personal lives" 
Hence, its more of just sending word out about the views on policies blah blah blah but also to get in touch with the online community, and to interact with them online. 

I came across quite an interesting article titled ‘Unfriending over politics’ by Howard Kurtz. It seems that people have blocked, unfriended or hidden someone whose political opinions they disagree (9% of those surveyed actually) (Kurtz, 2012). I think its quite funny that people unfriend each other just because of their political views. I think we live in a age where it should be common to be accepting and tolerant of others.

So. what is your view? Should we stop writing our political views on social networks lest we get ‘unfriended’ or ‘unfollowed’? (but I must say, I don’t really like to ‘friend’/’follow’ people who post political rants every single day ahahahhahaha.

Cya!