Can virtual social media spark real social change?

Yes. Trouble is, not always for the better. Social media is, says I as one more know-nothing who talks as though I am an expert, a strange thing. Wondrous, yet frustrating. I spend a fair bit of time on the various sites, facebooking, twittering, and to a lesser degree googleplussing (but I never go myspacing anymore). I do not live on these sites, and even should I wish to, having two young children and a wife in the real world makes it impossible. Same goes for gaming or reading or movie-watching. I’ve spent enough time on them to find some wonderful things. I’ve struck up virtual friendships with people I will never meet in the flesh who have more in common with me than many of my real life acquaintances.

I’ve been witness to social media (Twitter, in particular) saving lives and fanning revolutionary flames. When the earthquake struck Haiti, people were tweeting the locations of survivors buried in the rubble to allow the emergency services to reach them quicker. When revolution began to bubble up across the Middle East, Twitter became a real time instant method of communication, helping the movements to stay organised and allowing witnesses to report events to the outside world as they happened. News breaks quickly on Twitter. Too quick for Fox, BBC, Sky, MSNBC or any of the others to keep up.

Just recently there was the ‘invisible kids’ video which took off quicker and became bigger than anybody thought possible. But now here’s the problem. If something is presented in a certain way, it can allow something that has a suspect ulterior motive reach a much wider audience. I’m all for stopping dictators using child soldiers, but when the person telling me about it turns out to be attempting to build his own child army in service to his own dangerous religious agenda, it isn’t going to get me onside. Furthermore, getting caught wanking in public did him no additional favours. And yet, I wonder how many new recruits signed up to his cause. Too many, no doubt.

The recent issue around climate change is another example. Hacking thousands of emails and taking a few out of context ignited such an unfathomable fury of denial that the perception of science in general and climate science in particular, will probably take years to recover, despite the science being practically as sound as science gets. Nobody will search for the reams and reams of papers out there (try searching using Google scholar (select the ‘More’ drop down menu on the Google homepage, then ‘even more’, then ‘Scholar’) and searching not just for climate change, but some of its affects like ocean acidification, or glacier melt). Even now, very few people are aware that the supposedly damning revelation of ‘Mike’s Nature Trick’ relates to an interesting anomaly about tree rings and how since the 1960s climate data from tree rings has diverged from all the other data sets, and is nothing at all to do with a huge conspiracy involving every scientific institution (including NASA, for buggery’s sake!) and most world governments to, apparently, get rich from solar panels and electric cars. Or something.

So yes, a number of very real surges in public opinion can be attributed at least in part to the supposedly unreal online world, but, as is so often the case when people are involved, sometimes it is beautifully inspiring, and sometimes it makes you want to choke a donkey.