Blog Post #3 - Sharing and Internet Activism


As this week’s focus is on “The Media Manifold of ‘Sharing’ as Culture and Capital”, I have decided to focus on an important cultural revolution of Internet activism that was caused by sharing through the use of social media: the Arab Spring. Regarding the link attached below, the Arab Spring is a significant example that can relate to Nicholas A. John’s book titled The Age of Sharing. John’s book provides the example of the Arab Spring Twitter revolution in order to illustrate the ways that the Internet and social networking sites have allowed for specific positive processes, resulting in the core essence of the Internet to become sharing (John, 68). Through the use of social media, individuals in Arab countries were able to effectively express their thoughts and protest against unjust government acts. As John explains, sharing on social media allows for a wide range of distributive and communicative practices, along with the ability to participate amongst others with similar relations and concerns online (John, 64). Relatable to Graham Meikle’s chapter titled What Are Social Media?, establishing an online revolution to protest through Twitter is the type of “networked individualism” of online communities where individuals can interact, communicate, and share information with millions of other individuals around the world (Meikle, 10). Meikle and John’s explanation of how social media allows users to share and connect with others proves why the Arab Spring Twitter revolution was as successful as it was in achieving the power to overthrow political dictatorship and share stories with other victims.

Here is the link:
https://mic.com/articles/10642/twitter-revolution-how-the-arab-spring-was-helped-by-social-media#.YBtkmnMkA

Comments

  1. caitlyn gordonOctober 17, 2018 at 10:43 AM

    Hi Sierra,

    Really interesting post this week. I enjoy your use of terminology in relation to the way you are describing what you are talking about this week, it really helps with the understanding of what is going on in the course. This week we learned a lot about the sharing of social media and how everything we do on social media Is being shared in some sort of what. A theory that I am not fully supportive of because of the issue of privacy, which, in lecture was talked about this week and seems to be a very large issue with social media. There is simply, no privacy. To continue, I found your article to be very interesting because it shows how social media can also be very useful... a question for you: how is social media useful in your day-to-day life? Do you think that there are more pros or cons of the sharing caused by social media?

    - Caitlyn Gordon

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