Is there a Social-Media Fueled Protest Style? An Analysis From #jan25 to #geziparki
2013 June 1
by zeynep
When I tell people I study social media, politics and social movements, I often get a version of the question: “But there were protests before Facebook.” Sure, I say, but how did people hear about it? Word-of-mouth is, of course, one way but [in the modern era] it’s almost never never fast enough to spread protest of news quickly enough–remember, a political protest is a strategic game with multiple actors including a state which often wants to shut them down. Too slow diffusion of information, and your people will get arrested faster than they can show up at all. History of modern revolutions is always mixed up with the history and the structure of the communicative infrastructure of technology.***
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