Thursday, November 13, 2014

Journal 7

Reverting back to "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky, and continuing to talk about the recent effect that media, specifically social media is changing the way the world receives knowledge and the way that actions are being taken due to the received knowledge. Clay talks about how media is also a site for coordination. One of his examples for this was a bank in offered UK graduates interest free rate checking. When the students went on summer break the bank decided to start charging them a bunch of money instead of sticking to their free interest rate. Some of there student customers changed banks after this, but one was extremely angry and set up a Facebook page to stop the bank from ripping the students off and to give back the free rate that was promised. This caused students to come together even though they were dispersed in different areas of the world. The Facebook page created social coordination between the students. Some of the students shared easy tips on how to change bank accounts, and some started protesting. This led to more media attention and more protesting. In the end the bank decided to reinstate the original promise of interest free checking because of all the bad media and protesting that occurred.

No a days we live, breathe, and eat social media because it gives everyone a voice. It creates ways to coordinate globally and make things known, which causes actions, which cause change. Social media has become increasingly dangerous for the government (in my opinion) and awesome for the bringing problems and solutions to problems to the people. As discussed before in clay's book, it is crazy to see how social media has become a place where social injustice to one person can all of a sudden become social injustice problem all over the world. If you really want to make a change it seems like social media is the way to do it.

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