Deflating The Social Media Hype

This is exactly the sort of question I asked the author of this report [pdf] recently:

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, citizen journalism once again did nothing but spread misinformation at a time when thousands people with family at the base would have been freaking out already, and breach the privacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a single new fact, nor was a single life saved.

That’s Paul Carr at Techcrunch. I’m not sure if there’s a slick irony or sarcasm that I’m missing in his assertion that public demonstrations in the west stopped the invasion of Iraq. I was ‘on the streets’ in London too and Tony Blair pretty much said the demos didn’t happen and then sent troops to Iraq anyway. Carr’s point is clear though, and Adam Elkus picks up the theme at Red Team Journal: all the hype about social media and its ability to effect political change but what, really, has it achieved in this respect? The guy I asked – a senior BBC journalist – could only splutter in reply when I quizzed him about the strategic effect of social media. He didn’t have a satisfactory answer; it’s just assumed by many that, as Adam implies, noise = signal. Simply not true. A million protesters with cellphones do not a revolution make.