The Twitter Revolution

“Mere tools are not enough.”

Shirky writes in his book that people need tools to work in a collaborative but that they also need incentive to provide the effort. Nobody will just work on something that they feel will not further them or help them in any way. But people will go to extreme lengths to do something they believe in.

The next example for this project I want to talk about is the Arab Springs uprising, most notably the ones in Egypt that was dubbed both “The Facebook Revolution” and “The Twitter Revolution.”

The people of Egypt were unhappy and wanted change. They took to social media to stage a revolution and it worked and worked well. They used both Facebook and Twitter to announce to people where the protests were and they also used social media to give out useful information like how to deal with the police and where to go if you get hurt and things like that.

Egypt’s use of social media in their revolution was so successful that other countries looked to do the same. These revolutions are great example of the power that social media, like Twitter, have. It’s a great way to get information to masses and most importantly, it’s easy to use.

Shirky talks in his book about how communication tools won’t take off until they are used by the masses. At first only the privileged have access to new technology but as time goes on more people gain access to new technologies and that is when the technology will really take off. Since Twitter was available to the people it became their tool, their rallying cry, as these revolutions took place.

So to tie this back to the quote at the start, the tool, in this case Twitter, was not enough to start this revolution, there needed to be incentive and motivation behind it. Obviously in this case there was but what if this revolution fell on deaf ears? What if people just took it as some young kids trying to make a ruckus instead of a movement to benefit the people of Egypt? That was not the case. There was incentive to collaborate and the tools were there to be used and those tools were easy to use and available to the masses.

Combine all those elements together and you can get something special, like a revolution.