Awareness and Social Media Powers

Ambient Awareness

To further support technology, Thompson speaks of ambient awareness, which is someone’s ability to gage what another person is doing. On social media people are constantly up to date about what others are doing. Thompson mentions about how before social media, people almost never were aware of what their peers were doing outside of face-to-face contact. Now, people are able to display their actions on twitter, facebook, snapchat, and other forms of social media to let others be aware of what they are partaking in. People text all day, and, according to Thompson, people are able to create a sense of “greater connection” between each other due to the texting. This is allowing for growth in the individualization of humans as we see in the Van Dijk article.  Van Dijk says that, “(individuals) are participating in all kinds of communities without propinquity,”(Dijk, 2006).  Distance has no longer become a factor in communication with the implementation of the Internet and social media. People are able to freely post what they want and see what others have posted as well. There has become no boundary for communication, which benefits society as a whole.

Connected Society

Finally, Thompson goes into detail upon the powers of social media to rally people together and effect even some of the strictest governments around the world.  One example he speaks to involves a situation in Shifang, China.  There was an announcement that a plant processing copper alloy would be built in the area. Many people were concerned of hazards that come with this type of factory such as the toxic effects on the surrounding population. Local people took action on the Chinese twitter and started spreading around how this factory would cause outbreaks of cancer in the future for the city of Shifang. Then, many people protested the government and police tried to break it up. However, that proved costly for the police because people uploaded pictures of the police actions onto the Internet, making the government be shone in a poor light. Soon the local officials surrendered and the power of social media was able to save the town of Shifang from copper alloy pollution. This greatly related to an article written by Srinivasan, “Bridges between cultural and digital worlds in revolutionary Egypt.” In Egypt, people were able to coordinate rallies by using twitter and therefore help their society combat the unruly government. Both of these situations show the utter power of social media and how it can give people the strength to combat the wrongs within a society.