The Ubiquity of Tribes & The Widgets That Track Them
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008It’s clear the Internet is changing our world as we know it and we’re starting to see a significant shift in the balance of influence. American politics is slowly starting to wake up to this reality and only time will tell where we go from here.
But being submersed in the drama of American politics makes it really easy to forget about what’s going on elsewhere. This month’s issue of Wired changes that with a story on what social media’s doing to slowly crack the tightly controlled structure of authority in Egypt & the Middle East:
Back in March, Maher and a friend launched a Facebook group to promote a protest planned for April 6. It became an Internet phenomenon, quickly attracting more than 70,000 members. The April 6 youth movement — amorphous, lacking a clear mission*, and yet a bull’s-eye to the zeitgeist — blossomed within days into something influential enough to arouse the ire of Egypt’s internal security forces. Maher is part of a new generation in the Middle East that, through blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and now Facebook, is using virtual reality to combat corrupt and oppressive governments. Their nascent, tech-fired rebellion has triggered a government backlash and captured the world’s attention.
The article also ends with an interesting line of thought:
But Maher isn’t tortured. No one can say why his treatment in custody is more lenient this time around. One possibility is that, lacking specific orders to beat or harm him, his captors in Alexandria just went easy.
There is another hypothesis, though, one that many people familiar with Egyptian politics have suggested: Maher’s star has risen. His real-world profile is now high enough that torturing him could backfire, inspiring countless networked young people to take action. The last thing Hosni Mubarak needs is to turn this Facebooking regular guy into a full-fledged hero.
In a seemingly unrelated event, my favorite news website online, Socialmedian, is releasing an election widget with the Washington Post today:
The http://election.socialmedian.com site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion. We created this site with The Washington Post to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.
You can see what looks like to the right and although It’s not election day just yet, it’s never a bad thing to get a feel for what’s underfoot going into the election, so play with it (click “Join In” on the widget if you’re not a member) and let the games begin! (follow me at follow bushmanbill when you sign up).
*If the whole thing sounds “amorphous” & “lacking a clear mission” to you too, read Seth Godin’s latest book (aptly named Tribes), which is all about movements, what their made of, the things that happen to make tribes possible to begin with and how to keep them going. In what amounts to one long essay that goes by all too quickly, Godin explains the situation and then presents the opportunity:
A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea. For millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.
Now the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. All those blogs and social networking sites are helping existing tribes get bigger. But more important, they’re enabling countless new tribes to be born—groups of ten or ten thousand or ten million who care about their iPhones, or a political campaign, or a new way to fight global warming.
And so the key question: Who is going to lead us?
