We are living in the age of individual empowerment. The innovations that catch on the fastest and have the greatest social and cultural impact will be those that take this for granted. The mobile phone and Facebook are the most prominent innovations that illustrate this concept.
The upsurge in social activism and political protest we now see worldwide is directly a consequence of recent innovation. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, accessed primarily via mobile devices, are the tools that have helped dissatisfied youth precipitate revolts and eventually revolutions in several countries since the beginning of 2011.
When Mark Zuckerberg was sitting in his dorm room at Harvard in the winter of 2003-2004, he was thinking about major shifts in social behavior he believed were taking place, driven by the Internet. The two major trends. He saw were that transparency was growing and that people were sharing more information with one another. He proceeded to invent Facebook specifically and consciously to take account of those trends, assuming that the product that would most succeed at colleges (the only market he targeted then) would be one that presumed these trends.
He may not have consciously thought about what would happen once Facebook became widely adopted by young people around the world. But the upsurge in Tunisia and Egypt as well as many other countries this year did not surprise him. He knew that an innovation that helped people share information more freely – that was essentially a new form of communication – would have political as well as social ramifications.
Today when asked about whether Facebook gets credit for bringing down governments in the Arab world, Zuckerberg invariably answers “no.” But he does so for two reasons. One is that he is literally telling the truth – only angry people brave enough to risk their lives protesting in the streets can bring down a regime. Facebook was just a tool. The other reason is that he knows that whatever motives and inspiration he may have had at the birth of Facebook, he now has to be extremely careful about how he positions the service. Facebook is used in almost every country, including scores that remain highly undemocratic. Were Zuckerberg to trumpet the role of Facebook in ousting Ben Ali of Tunisia and Mubarak of Egypt, dictators and autocrats all over the world could use his statements as additional ammunition to either shut off access to Facebook or more aggressively monitor user behavior there.
But it’s important to understand why this new communication medium is having such a profound political impact. And it does have to do with the principles Zuckerberg baked into the original design.
Facebook turns every individual into a broadcaster. In the not-distant past, there were very few broadcasters, and they were under the control of only the state or a few large corporations. Now all of us can broadcast messages to whomever has become our friend on Facebook, and sometimes to others as well.
You may say that broadcasting a message just to friends cannot possibly compare to broadcasting to a nation over a radio network. In fact, however, the impact is not dissimilar, if the theme of the broadcast is one that its audience is receptive to. Facebook’s broadcast impact is based on “viral” transmission – you post an update or video on Facebook, and it streams into the news feeds of your friends. If they click “like” or make a comment on the update, that propels it to be re-broadcast to their friends. The viral chain continues if the original message strikes a chord for whatever reason. In Tunisia, the updates sent by ordinary unemployed college graduates who were deeply unhappy about their nation’s economic and political stasis received a virally supercharged distribution. In effect what often happens in such situations is that people suddenly realize they are not alone – that the views they hold are in fact unexpectedly held also by many others. As this realization sets in as viral retransmission of Facebook messages continues, a collective shift of attitude unfolds. This is the exact dynamic underway in August in Israel, according to news reports. While economic suffering has been widespread, it has until now been impolitic to complain about it. But the act of one young woman posting on Facebook that she was going to erect a tent in public as a protest against high housing prices has precipitated a national mood of protest the first time in recent memory that the nation has been focused so completely on domestic issues. Again, only once the viral messages of support began ricocheting around Facebook did the citizens of Israel begin to collectively realize so many of them felt the same economic frustrations.
The age of empowerment will continue. Facebook is only one of many technologies – important because it has become so widely adopted. But the potential for new innovations based upon the mobile phone and the amazing software that can reside there – social or otherwise – is limitless. Those innovations that presume, as Mark Zuckerberg did, that they will dovetail with this macro long term trend are the ones that will change the world.
This article was written in 2011.
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