Social Media is the term used to define the
online interactions between people via “sharing sites” like Facebook, Twitter,
Google+, LinkedIn, among others. Many
people consider the use of Blackberry Messenger’s broadcast feature to be a
part of Social Media, and indeed it does accomplish the same task of staying
connected to a larger social group. The
use of Social Media to engage in dialogues has skyrocketed since its inception
in the late 1990s with sites like Friendster and MySpace. Social Media is the modern extension of the
Town Hall; where anyone with a connected device like a computer or smartphone
can communicate instantaneously with other like minded individuals.
It is said that Cayman has one of the
highest per capita penetration of Blackberry smartphones in the world. A casual glance around the Island seems to
support this. In coffee shops,
restaurants, retail stores, and even on the beach, one can see more people on
their devices than enjoying the coffee, food, shopping, and the sun and
sand. They’re on Facebook, Twitter,
sending BBMs, staying connected to their social networks.
Social Media has revolutionized the way
people communicate around the world. One only has to point to recent events in
the United Kingdom to see how Social Media has affected not only the
participants, but the whole world.
The recent riots in London were said to
have been perpetuated by people using Blackberry Messenger to organise and
execute their looting and destruction.
On the other side of the coin, people were using their smartphones and
taking pictures/capturing videos and then uploading them to Facebook and
YouTube in an effort to catch some of the perpetrators of the violence.
Joshua Errett, a writer for NOW Magazine in
Toronto recently categorized the role of Social Media in public uprisings like
this: “In Iran, it was the Facebook revolution. In Tunisia, the Wikileaks revolution.
In Egypt, it was called a Twitter revolution. In London, it’s the BlackBerry
riots.” He continues to discuss the
responses by governments to these revolutions and specifically the efforts of
Tottenham MP David Lammy demanding that Blackberry’s company Research In Motion
pull the plug on the messaging service in an attempt to quell the riots. A Twitter campaign was even started using
#blockBBM as a trending topic that people could follow. Good luck with that, Mr. Lammy. As Errett notes, “the irony of a Twitter-led
push to censor technology apparently lost on tweeters.” Read the original post here.
If BBM would have been
shut down in the UK, people would have gone to Twitter. And if Twitter was shut down, people would
have gone to Facebook. And if Facebook
was shut down, trust in the fact that some other technological path would have
cropped up (or brought back to life) for people to communicate. Whether that would be mass emails, forums, or
even old school bulletin board systems that used to be accessed over phone
systems with 1200 baud modems during the Internet’s infancy.
The fact is that you can’t unring a bell;
Social Media is really no different than groups of people congregating over
commonality; whether it’s varying interests in fiction or fact, or overthrowing
a form of governance.