"The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They control the minds of the masses."- Malcolm X
The golden words of Malcom X have somehow represented the current situation of how the media is gaining power and importance in the heart of our society. Astonishingly, the intensive use of the internet, especially Social Networking Services (SNS) or the so-called "social media" has been a common denominator in the popular social movements and protests that have occured in the past few decades, even in the most diverse scenarios. But beforehand, we shall ask---why do social movements occur and how does social media abet it?
Social Movements and Protests, The Society's Means of Expression
As the dissatisfaction with the dictatorial regimes, as well as the rising youth unemployment, corruption, poverty, inflation, and violent repression, social movements and protests are becoming more rampant. They are used to voice society's hope for change. The prelude of these movements also occurs on the internet in many forms, such as twitter threads, facebook posts, and instagram hashtags. To put it in another way, this agenda arises from the moment citizens express their indignation via social networks or in the current internet jargon, when it "goes viral".
Like other aspects of the modern world, contemporary social movements begin to undergo gradual transformation. The internet and social network in particular, grease the wheels of the events and fetch them to international attention at unprecedented pace, enabling the uprisings to be bigger by the rapid gatherings of the masses.
This social network also symbolises the new social morphology of our society. This society, named as the "network society", uses information and communication technologies to establish its social structure. However, the internet is a tool that emerges but does not change behavior; on the contrary, people's behavior takes advantage of the internet to broaden and organize itself into what it represents (de Moraes, 2004).
In spite of this, with respect to the social movements, the fact stresses that major mass demonstrations of the population were organized by mobilization via social media and thereafter showed their strength with the massive presence of people on the street. One deals with a standard feature of the social movements, namely that they spill over from social media onto the street. Fascinatingly, this phenomenon has existed for a long time.
History and Present Time Show It All
If we look meticulously into this phenomenon, social movements appear to have been influenced by social media, and it's no different from how history has shown. History provides examples of media incentivizing street protests, which spread across borders. To give an instance, the popular displeasure which terminated communism in Eastern Europe began in Poland in the early 1980s swept through Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania by the help of Radio Free Europe. The radio spread the information about protests and catalyzed its spillover across borders (Puddington, 2000).
Not stopping from that, 30 years later, the wave of street protests that sparked the Arab Spring in 2011 established social media as the new conduit for the spread of protests. In 2019, a second wave of protests that started in Sudan and Algeria spread to other Arab countries, including the Arab Republic of Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq, subsequently resulting in a global contagion of protests spreading over Chile to the Russian Federation to Hong Kong SAR, China.