Computer mediated communication

Mobilization through blogs and social networks

Internet and computer mediated communication is capable of integrating people from distinct places in a common cause, even though they don't know each other physically, or if they live far away one from another. Manifestations, generally associated with political facts and human rights, emerge in distinct points of cyberspace, and connect people distant among each other in the pursuit of solutions, or simple mobilization, for problems that are common to a large number of people


By GABRIELA ZAGO
from Pelotas, BRAZIL


Although blogs, in their beginning, operated as a repository of links, they became worldwide famous as personal journals. But beyond being used for narrating someone's life, blogs can actually be used for a wide variety of purposes - like for journalism or for corporate communication. Even though people tend to look to blogs as a mere tool for publishing content, blogs can also be seen as social networks, and, as a social device, they can be used for coordinated actions between many people, in order to promote collective actions and social mobilization.

A social network is a network composed of people. In the case of blogs, each node is a blog, a profile featuring someone's ideas. All relations established among those blogs represent the nodes on the network - comments, links exchanges, anyway, anything can be used to exteriorize this connection among blogs (which in fact means the connections among the people represented by their blogs).

That potential can be used to fast spread information through many people. Benefiting from the network architecture, information diffusion can be made through a social network. Internet has a great ability to aggregate people from different parts of the world together in one single cause. Also, mobile devices can help spread this mobilization even farther. Coordinate actions can take one word far enough to reach a higher goal than one single person would be capable of reaching.

Example of collective actions that can be started and promoted by blogs are political Google bombs, collective blogging posts (blog carnivals) on specific themes, and others. A Google bomb happens when many people intentionally tries to hack Google results, forcing associations between links and certain terms of search. Since Google search functions based on the number of income links a certain pages receive associated with the terms used to link that page, a large number of intentional links can adulterate search results for a certain term. One example is the Persian/Arabian Gulf Google bomb, started by a blogger, that successfully associated the term "Arabian Gulf" to a site similar to an error page stating that such thing as an Arabian Gulf does not exist, and the user should try Persian Gulf instead. Due to the effort of many bloggers all over the world, it remains as the number one result for "Arabian Gulf" at Google. This Google bomb has political purposes, since it involves dispute over the right name for that Gulf.

One example of collective blog post is the Free Burma, which happened last year, on October 4th, and evolved blogs from all over the word in defense of the Burmese people.

Global Voices Advocacy provides guides for those who want to learn how to blog for a cause (http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/guide-blog-for-a-cause/ ). There's also a guide on how to blog anonymously (http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/guide/ ). This is special interesting for people living in places where censorship and dictatorship still remains.

These forms of collective action can call the attention to certain facts that might not be getting enough media attention; a collective voice has a greater chance of being heard rather than a single voice; when exploring the potential of blogs as a social network, a single piece of information can be spread farther, and therefore hit many more people.

That way, Internet and computer mediated communication is capable of integrating people from distinct places in a common cause, even though they don't know each other physically, or if they live far away one from another. Manifestations, generally associated with political facts and human rights, emerge in distinct points of cyberspace, and connect people distant among each other in the pursuit of solutions, or simple mobilization, for problems that are common to a large number of people. Internet, while a means of social communication, allows that people from different parts of the world can organize actions in benefit of determinate causes, creating new forms of coordinate actions.


(Published: 10.10.2008.)