Social Media Revolution (Qualman)

Erik Qualman and the folks over at Socialnomics created this piece with a simple, yet bold, question: Is Social media a fad, or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

The question is loaded, and I don't believe that it is designed to make a "Technology is responsible for all good change in the world" type of argument. What it firmly establishes, through a series of simple facts, is a rapidly changing world, a world in which youth + technology = a change in the power structure, for good and for bad, that has existed for generations, or in some cases millenia.

Plus, with a soundtrack by Fatboy Slim, how can one go wrong? So turn it up, and learn some facts.

Egypt Special: A Lesson Learned About Twitter From Al Jazeera

Twitter is just another communication tool, there to be leveraged by anyone with the will and the ambition. Yet just as Al Jazeera’s coverage of Egypt would sound ridiculous if described as "Television Revolution", so do straw=man notions of a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, or indeed anywhere else. The Twitter of 2011 looks like it will become a mature, integrated part of the media landscape: if protesters in Tahrir Square did not have access, it still had a role to play in bringing the story to the outside world.

The jury’s still out on what Al Jazeera’s rise in prominence meant for the people of Egypt. As with Iran in 2009, we may never know just how many people inside the country were getting their information from these sources. But the jury is definitely in on how the channel has benefited greatly from positioning itself as the source of information from Egypt among mainstream news outlets, and it can thank social media for a pivotal influence in this rise.

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