Social media: Better at provoking social revolutions than media revolutions?

Raymond Snoddy says it is totally banal to say that instant communication tools in the hands of almost every citizen can change societies dramatically at breakneck speed and be a force for both good and evil in equal measure. But it would be true…

The 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11 in the media this week have been necessary and moving, despite a general familiarity with the tragic material.

Did more than 200 people really jump to their deaths rather than face the terrible flames? How horrible to be reminded that not one person survived out of the 658 employees from banking firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who occupied floors 101,103,104 and 105 in the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

We have to do our duty and watch and ponder.

Then later this evening on Channel 4 there is a kind of completion with what is claimed as the “most complete story yet of the operation to find and kill Osama Bin Laden”.

Yet despite the scale of the al qaeda atrocities and the power of the 10th anniversary peg, it is a two-part BBC 2 documentary marking rather more recent, and ultimately more positive, news emanating from the Middle East that lives in the memory: Mishal Husain’s How Facebook Changed the World.

The events are still in train, no-one knows where Gaddafi is and, with the exception of Egypt and Tunisia, free elections are still some way off in Libya and Syria. But it is still a good time to look at what the social media collectively – and Facebook and Twitter in particular – has achieved.

Revisionist historians are probably already at work downplaying the role of the social media in sparking the Arab Spring and talking about food prices, poverty and unemployment instead.

It is obvious that revolutions rarely have a single cause. But Mishal Husain, by travelling to the previously obscure town of Sidi Bouzid in southern Tunisia to tell the tale of Modamed Bouazizi, the fruit-seller who burned himself to death in protest against local bureaucrats, demonstrates that it was the mobile phone and the internet that made the difference.

Without Facebook and the internet it is likely that the small scale riots, and the official violence they attracted following Bouazizi’s self-immolation, might have rated a paragraph or two in the foreign press when the information eventually seeped out. Official Tunisian television would never have carried such a story.

Instead Facebook pictures were posted and were instantly available round the world, not least to democratic radicals in Tunis, who saw the potential and set to work on their larger scale social media revolution. Then onwards to coverage in the 24-hour Arabic news channels.

In a way former Egyptian president Mubarak understood the power of the internet very well-first by closing it down when Egypt’s demonstrations broke out and then trying to use it, as it happens unsuccessfully, for his own political advantage.

Less positively, social media was almost certainly an important player in assembling the witless rioters who trashed the centres of a number of English cities this summer.

Some have argued that the wall-to-wall coverage of the violence on 24-hour television channels helped spread the violence in the form of copy-cat theft and plunder. They probably did, although you can’t de-invent non-stop television news or its propensity to linger, sometimes alarmingly, on the top story of the day.

But young hoodies are not exactly seen as the target audience for 24-hour television news, which tends to attract rather more portly and law-abiding citizens.

Once again, after all the talk about the feral underclass has run its course, the tool that brought mainly young people on to the streets for the most disreputable of purposes was social media and that most implausible badge of poverty and deprivation – the BlackBerry.

It is totally banal to say that instant communication tools in the hands of almost every citizen can change societies dramatically at breakneck speed and be a force for both good and evil in equal measure. But it would be true.

It is a difficult lesson that politicians, those responsible for law enforcement and the media, will have to get their minds around. The media will have to come to terms with the fact that breaking news, particularly off the beaten track, will probably always be in second place from now onwards.

There the bad news stops. As long as what used to be called, wrongly, citizen journalism is put in context and verified as much as humanly possible, social media in all its forms provides an instant resource for the mainstream media, an endless stream of potential stories and pictures that could not be realistically obtained any other way.

And as Deloitte made clear in TV+ (the consultant’s continuing research for the Edinburgh Television Festival) social media is not about to supplant traditional television anytime soon. As Deloitte makes clear, UK viewers spend no less than 35 times more time watching television than they do on social networks.

The aggregate numbers are of course crude but are nonetheless worth restating. In May this year 54.5 million viewers aged two or more watched a total of 6.4 billion hours of television or 118 hours per viewer. In the same month consumption of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin totalled 182 million hours – 6 hours 39 minutes per person.

Part of the gulf is obviously caused by the fact that more people watch television than use social networks and some consume both simultaneously.

However, the consultants have calculated that if TV viewing stays constant over the next 10 years and Facebook maintains its present double-digit annual growth rate, by 2021 the social networking phenomenon would account for 10%t of the time spent watching television.

Perhaps social media is better at provoking social revolutions than media revolutions.