I’m likely to be speaking with you today in regards to the role of the Web in political activism. So I spent time with your activists and asked them whether or not they were using social media marketing, whether they certainly were engaging with the Web, and why they may be doing it.
Venturing out in to the field and speaking to political activists is important, as it offers you an insight into their ideology, their motivations, and why they believe it’s important to utilize certain Web technologies.
To be able to go and talk with these activists, I wanted a way of research that combined computer science and social science. And that’s where Web science came in.
I have a background in international relations, so I knew about political ideology theoretically and doing an MSc in Web science, and knowing about networks and organisation online was essential for me.
So with this in mind, I resulted in in London, willing to observe how these political activists were using the Web for his or her protests. And what I found was that, broadly now, in 2013, there is apparently lots of apathy, or even outright hostility, towards the Web and social media.
The primary reason? The NSA.
The story had just broken that large American online corporations, like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, were cooperating with the NSA and collecting a lot of personal information about citizens from not only America, but throughout the world. This was something which had type of been known beforehand, although not to the scale. And it put lots of these activists off engaging with your mainstream websites and these mainstream social media services, simply because they saw them now as part of the establishment.
If you appear back towards the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, these technologies were technologies of liberation for many people. However now, only 2 yrs later, they’ve become technologies that symbolise surveillance by the state, the loss of privacy by individuals, and the general ability for both corporations and governments to help keep citizens in line and stop such protests.
Discovering this was extremely important for both my research, but additionally for Web science. Because I believe it showed how it is very important to consider both social and the technical facets of the Web together.
The Web is this thing, which can be computers, but additionally humans. It’s humans influencing technology, and technology influencing humans. And if that you don’t look at how one affects one other, it is very difficult to state for D13 several how society has been changed and developed.
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