Political Movements

Virality has a much larger effect on the world than just effecting airline customer service or getting a bigot kicked out of school. Nahone and Hemsley talk about some of the biggest changes, specifically large political movements from virality. The key example they use when discussing this surprisingly enough comes from a time period long before the Internet. The authors claim that viral information is now new, and examples of rapidly moving information are still found before the Internet. To prove all of this they use a story that most people are familiar with. On December 1^st, 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white person on a segregated bus. Instead of the Internet people used phones, handbills, and word of mouth. (Hemsley & Nahon, 2013, p. 1) The authors estimate that within three days over 40,000 African-Americans had heard the news, and joined the famous boycott of the bus system. As we all know this was a key stepping stone in the American Civil rights movement, and it was virality that made it effective.

Political changes like what was sparked from Rosa Parks still happen around the world today, and virality continues to play a vital role. A great example of this can be seen with Ramesh Srinivasan’s article about his journey to Egypt during their political movement. The overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt was the first major revolution to occur with YouTube being extremely prevalent. The ease of being able to point-shoot-and-upload allowed for people all over the world to see what was really going on in Egypt. These videos got massive amounts of views daily, putting this uprising in the international spotlight. Srinivasan felt he must see this new, modern, revolution first hand.

The most surprising thing Srinivasan saw when he was in Egypt took place during an actual riot. He had heard reports that 10,000 people were being sprayed with teargas, but when he actually went to check it out, not only was this true, but there was something else going on. There was an entire group of people on the outskirts of the riot, doing nothing but live tweeting away what was happening. (Srinivasan, 2013, p.55) This allowed detailed reports of the riots to get out to the world. In Park’s case it took three whole days for 40000 people to hear about what had happened, but now, 40000 people can see these tweets in just minutes. The travel of information is vital to cause political change, and this is proven evident in cases that have occurred over 50 years apart from each other.