Social Media and Revolution: A Theoretical Framework in application

Through the examples of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, Skinner (2011) has drawn out the theoretical frameworks to explain the increasingly significant role of the Internet and social media facilitating revolutionary social movements. Specifically, three Information Studies paradigms - the physical metaphor, cognitive metaphor and social informatics - were introduced as alternative and complementary perspectives in assisting future researchers with their topics.

While physical paradigm considers information as a physical object which can be recorded in texts. This metaphor assumes that information exists independently of human consciousness in an objective reality and that information exists separately in this realm. Whereas the cognitive paradigm is known to come out of criticism of the physical paradigm, arguing that information is situational and depending on humans. Information does not play any role of informing people without being interpreted. Then comes along the social informatics in which it tries to response and fill up the missing parts in the earlier paradigms where it goes a step further to draw the connection between humans to see how they we interact with one another, not just seeing how we interact with information.

In this week's blog post, basing on the theoretical frameworks and its critics mentioned above, I attempt to put them into practice by examining more examples of other kinds of social movement.

The first example is the Invisible Children's "KONY 2012" campaign. The strongly provocative images and messages in the 30-minute documentary supported and spread through the social media platforms. It is noteworthy that our social networking profiles or the information that we choose to post or share is rarely neutral even if we are reporting a live events. It is almost always a subjective reflection or interpretation of our personalities. Thus what we share or post depends on this "identity management" and what makes "KONY 2012" an initial viral social movement is the fact that it is aimed at "culture makers" - prominent philanthropists, celebrities and policy makers. KONY 2012 received the virtual world's support by being tweeted and mentioned worldwide via Twitter and Facebook, by the followers of those big figures. Such seemingly positive feedback turned into a cyclical social media flood, allowing KONY 2012 to go viral. Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey or Ryan Seacrest and other celebrities received over 36000 tweets on the topic of KONY 2012 and Invisible Children.

Following this example, we can see the importance of the news source and how it targets big names to spread the words, just relying on the credibility rather than the content itself alone - thus fits in with the social informatics paradigm and cognitive paradigm. The fact that the campaign only existed only in the virtual world and died down after receiving no concrete or tangible action support and received a lot of criticisms afterwards proves that its content does play a factor in allowing a movement to flourish or not. And this means that no matter how big and dazzling the campaigners want their campaign to be, information and content do independently exist for the audience to choose - though it might take a longer time for the case of KONY 2012.

The three paradigms each has its own attributes and setbacks, however, in order to have a holistic picture of any given phenomenon, it helps to employ all of them complementarily for reference and better understanding.
However, it helps to understand that this piece also attempts to apply the theoretical framework to make sense of the real life events. But the notion of social media facilitating social movements and revolutions is still in in the progress of development and there is whether or not, a certain event is a revolution in its true meaning is still up to question, depending on the examining standpoint - its purpose, its characteristics and its outcome, to name a few.