CH-CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

Here’s an intriguing question: Does social media have the power to change the world? Read the management textbooks and they’ll tell you that change is good. Change reinvigorates organisations, empowers employees, fosters creativity and enables advancement. That’s the theory, anyway. Whether companies actually put it into practice is a matter for conjecture. What is unarguable, however, is that change isn’t viewed nearly so positively on a societal level. In fact, once they’re in, governments of all political persuasions and regimes of all degrees of repression and general nastiness go out of their ways to stop change – and, as a result, stay in. The Obama effectrnTwo years must seem like a very long time in politics as far as Barack Obama is concerned. In November 2008, amidst unprecedented international attention, he was elected promising to bring, coincidentally, change. Obama was able to mobilise the traditionally apathetic 18-24-year-olds into voting – for him – by speaking to them via the channels they already used. Social media and ‘new technology’ wasn’t just part of the strategy, it was the strategy. Before the election, Obama’s use of mobile phones – including announcing Joe Biden as his running mate via text message – was called ‘a novel development’. In the aftermath, it’s been hailed as decisive. As an aide to Obama’s opponent, John McCain, put it: ‘We did a lot of new-media stuff, but in the context of the Obama campaign [which had an active presence in up to 40 social networking sites and services], anything we did was automatically drowned out because they were so good at it.’ Two years later, with Obama’s Democratic Party facing a significant voter backlash in the midterm congressional elections, his ability to bring about the promised change is in doubt. But his original electoral breakthrough demonstrates the potential of social media as an epoch-shaping agent. Mass mobilisationrnIn 2009, another election, this time in Iran, demonstrated the power and reach of social media. The Iranian government could control the traditional media channels, but it was powerless to prevent the images it didn’t want the world to see (of opponents being beaten and killed) from being released through blogs, Twitter (which almost collapsed from the sheer weight of traffic), SMS and myriad other social media sources. Closer to home, organisations like GetUp are mounting enormously successful social media campaigns to save forests, win 98,000 extra Australians the right to vote and challenge the big banks over the various fees and charges they levy.rnUltimately, lasting change requires the will of most of the people. It may yet happen in countries like Iran; and it may even happen in a broadly democratic country like Australia in the face of issues such as Internet censorship. The fact that social media is such an easy, far-reaching tool for mass mobilisation increases the possibility of the desired changes taking place sooner rather than later. So does social media have the power to change the world? Not in itself, but as an agent, as a means to an end, most definitely. It’s a tantalising prospect.