It’s easy to underestimate the cultural and political significance of Facebook and Twitter if you mostly share updates of what you had for breakfast, or post photos of a booze-fueled night out with friends. But for the long-oppressed citizens of Tunisia, Iran and Egypt, among others, social networking sites helped provide the sparks needed to ignite a revolution.
This sentiment was echoed all throughout the various plenary sessions and workshops of Deutsche Welle’s 2011 Global Media Forum, which gathered 1,500 delegates to discuss the challenges of working with new media and its impact on globalization and human rights. Recent events, particularly in the Middle East, have shown the potency of social networking’s effectiveness in mobilizing political action.
“Media can be a powerful instrument for human rights,” says Eric Betterman, Director General of Deutsche Welle. “Social media has put a new impulse for protest movements.”
The surge in Internet activism is undoubtedly one of the biggest developments in new media and journalism, but can also be questionable at times. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are used in order to call attention to various causes ranging from the 2009 Iranian election to breast cancer to children’s rights, with mixed results.
‘Online slacktivism,’ a term coined to describe the passive demonstration of support for various causes, leaves observers on the fence. On one hand, a Facebook meme* that came out in 2009 prompted women to post their bra color on their status update. Why? To support the fight against breast cancer. Heavily mocked and criticized as faux activism (men posted colors on their updates as a joke), it nonetheless spawned a similar meme in the next year.
A basic right
On the other hand, another meme—this time, people posted photos of their favorite childhood cartoons—supposedly in order to raise awareness for anti-child abuse organizations actually caused a spike in donations to children’s shelters. While the jury is still out on the usefulness of memes in Internet activism, there’s no doubt that around the world, bloggers and citizen journalists from non-democratic societies are using it to make themselves heard to the rest of the world, if not their own countries. Suddenly, the Internet made it possible for many people to exercise a human right denied to them until recently: the right to free speech. It is for this particular reason that the United Nations proposed that Internet access be made into a right on the same level as water, food and electricity.
“The strongest force of globalization is a new freedom, and the Internet is key,” says Thorbjørn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe. “Access to the Internet should become a human right.”
Although the world is far from being a united entity connected by the Internet, there is an obvious paradigm shift in communication and politics. Prior to social networking, it was more difficult for say, an American teenager in Ohio to understand the gravity of election-related violence in Iran. Or for a reporter from Brookyln, New York, to read about the everyday pains of a Tunisian woman living in a country ruled by dictators living in unabashed opulence. “The world had to move from nationalism to internationalism,” says Jagland. “This was the lesson learned [after the two world wars.]”
Despots have cowered and fled to other countries in fear of retribution from the people they once oppressed—because those people have finally found a way to make themselves heard to the rest of the world. This is a significant development in the pursuit of human rights, because people can use the Internet as an outlet to protest injustice from occasionally dubious governments. Hans-Jürgen Beerfeltz, State Secretary of Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, feels this is a positive development. “With the help of new media, people could put more and more pressure on autocratic regimes.”
The need for gatekeepers
Despite the general positive reaction to the way that the Internet has changed the way news is produced, experts warn journalists and the public to be cautious. The deluge of information available online—and not all of it true—can overwhelm gullible consumers. Without a gatekeeper to weed out inaccurate data, the Internet can be equally damaging to development and human rights. “Professional media has never been needed more than today,” notes Betterman.
Beerfeltz shares his sentiment. “Free access to free media alone is not enough,” he says. “People need gatekeepers to help determine what is important or unimportant, what is untrue, what is unnecessary… The press is the artillery of freedom.”
The idea that the public should rely on a profit-driven news organization to determine what is important or newsworthy can be unacceptable, but Beerfeltz feels that the issue can be addressed with further professionalization and training of the media. “A fundamental prerequisite is education,” he states. “There should be adequate training for journalists. With it, the quality of information is improved and safeguarded.”
*What’s in a meme?
An Internet meme is a concept or idea that spreads online. It could be a trend expressed through text (such as putting a preconceived idea on Facebook status updates or intentionally misspelled words like “more” to “moar”), images (like LOLcats), videos (like Rickrolling), hashtags, etc. Memes often evolve with time and use.
By: Bianca Consunji
