Sunday, April 8, 2012

From internet to the street : a new form of revolution




Recent revolutions underlined the new role played by social Medias. The new internet generation characterized by a convergence of social Medias as well as advances made in the field of new technologies found on internet a new public space to express its opinions. 
The nature of contemporary revolutions like the movement “Occupy Wall Street” or the revolutions in the Arab world may lead us to wonder whether nowadays social Medias became a necessary base to efficient revolutions.

It’s worth notice that without internet, it would be difficult for militants to be heard insofar as social Medias appear as a tool of mobilization.
The movement Occupy Wall Street demonstrated the efficiency of an action led at the same time in the street and on line.  The movement started with the publication of an article written by an American Journalist, David Degraw. He declared that 99% of the American population wasn’t politically represented; he then created the Movement of the 99%:  a social network where citizens could post propositions of economic or social reforms. After that, the group Anonymous offered him to create a safer website on which the NGO Adbusters spread the idea of a pacific sit-in for July 13th. For the Guardian “the movement Occupy Wall Street uses the social networks as a tool of organization. Indeed, according to the British newspaper “Anonymous developed a Twitter application, Urge, which campaigned to forbid violence during the manifestation”.  



Though, the protest movement wouldn’t have had the same echo without this “double-revolution”. The new Medias created the information as well as they spread it. They appeared as an alternative to the traditional Medias that didn’t relay the event. Indeed, the American conservative channels like CNN or Fox News remained silent about the movement; their refusal of transmitting the information was given the name of “Black-out” by the indignants.  At the same time a wave of protest took place on the web where American Medias were made fool of.  


The movement really developed on the web. All the means of new communication have been mobilized to amplify and share the message of the movement on a global scale. The indignants shared their thoughts on blogs , websites like Global Revolution permitted to follow the events continually, while Global-square allowed the cybernaute to visualize an interactive map of the world where the movements were taking place. Internet  appeared as a public space, the website Global-square was an answer to the need of creation of a virtual assembly, a platform that would “foster individual participation and structure collective action” as argued the creators of the website. The creators admitted that Facebook or Twitter had been helpful for “disseminating basic information and aiding mass mobilization” but they didn’t provide them “with the tools for extending a participatory model of decision making up to the global level”.


What we need (…) is a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations. “


The use of the new Medias by the movement proved that internet highly contributed to the development of new democratic practices by creating new places for social participation. The internet generation is using new technologies in order to get involved in the actuality at a time where a reconsideration of the principles of national-state is developing. Indeed, internet for example appears as a way of getting round censorship of information, while the control of information by a state is one of the most important mean to exercise its power. As far as Occupy Wall Street Movement is concerned; many militants turned into “citizen-journalists”. 


As an example, Tim Pool a former skateboard videographer filmed the movement with his Samsung Galaxy S II phone and webcastedthe action. His videos knew a world-wide success: he had more than 20 000 simultaneous viewers and 250 000 visitors in one day, his video were also broadcasted by Al-Jazeera English.  

Though, nowadays New Social Medias play an essential role in the development of revolutions. The actors adapted their tools of action to the evolution of society. They knew how to take advantage of the advances in the field of technologies in order to spread their movement. The new social Medias became tools of organization as well as platforms for social participations reshaping the traditional forms of democracy. They revealed necessary for the development of participative democracy and question the actual tools of governing.  

They actually appear as active forms of counter-power: a concrete example can be given through an event which occurred in Lithuania which shows how citizens used internet to oppose to a justice decision. The affair started in 2004; Deimantel a 4 year old little girl told her father how her mother (they were separated) used to prostitute her. In 2009, the Lithuanian justice which had been seized accused the father of slander, actually many politic men were involved in this scandal. The justice gave a ruling on reaccording the custody of the child to her mother.   The father then decided to webcast a video of her daughter where she described the pedophile acts in order to denounce the scandal.  Many Lithuanians opposed the police force; they camped in front of the house of the mother. Anonymous called the population to help policemen from giving back the little girl to her mother on #OpLithChild and a petition  has been started on Change.org. .

Audrey Diboine 


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