The Environmental View of Social Media Use

This week I encountered an interesting article on the power of social media to enact political change. The author discusses two views on how social media can be used in the public sphere. The first is the instrumental view. This view suggests that social media can be utilized as an expedient public organization tool to enact swift and extreme social and political change. While the author is critical of this view, he provides examples of political movements that began this way. Protests in the Philippines, Spain and Moldova are a few of the examples provided, but for each example of success, there is an example of failure. The Occupy movement, which began in New York in 2011, is a recent example of an American-borne protest movement that attempted to utilize social media in this way, and fizzled before accomplishing any substantive reform.

The author argues instead for an environmental view of social media use. According to this view “pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere.” (p. 5) Social media should be used to garner communication between individuals and not simply for eliciting action. This view calls for slow political change on the basis of public dialogue, rather than swift crowd-based protest that seek to obtain immediate results. 

This article is useful for the consideration of my tracing topic, because I aim to explore the public spaces that are available to publics interested in education reform. No doubt social media will be a huge part of the online landscape. According to Shirky, it is social media, and not internet-based information storehouses, that provide the greatest opportunity for public engagement in social issues. In this article the author describes a two-step process for changing public opinion. Step one is the distribution of information by media outlets, and the second is the resulting conversation and debate among family, friends, and acquaintances (p. 6). Social media allows for a broader range of participants in the conversation step, and this, according to Shirky, is where social media’s real power rests. 

Shirky goes on to assert that the information step is less important than the resulting conversation when it comes to producing social action. This conclusion seems problematic to me given my understanding of how social movements occur. The need for information and conversation seem to be symbiotic. The populace needs the information to inform their discourse, and they need their discourse to inform which outlets they trust to provide their information. In relation to education reform, this translates to a need for the citizenry to be informed on the issues affecting education (information) and a place for conversation to occur online (social media). My exploration into the online landscape of education reform will need to encompass both the informational outlets, and the online forums for discourse.

In my opinion, the environmental view of social media use has far reaching implications that extend beyond the need to provide open access to chat rooms, blogs, or twitter feeds.  In order for these social media tools to be put to their full potential, the populace must be educated on their use. Here I am afraid that my thinking takes a cyclical turn. I am arguing that we need education reform in order to create an informed populace, but we may need a pre-existing informed populace to enact education reform.

Shirky, Clay. "The Political Power of Social Media Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change." The Council on Foreign Affairs (2011): n. pag. Web. 6 July 2013. <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media>