Places and forms of power

Places and forms of power
I’m going to talk about the idea of « places and forms of power ». First of all, I’d like to give a definition of the notion. Power is a form of authority which implies a division, and even sometimes an opposition between people who have power, and people who don’t and who may develop different forms of conterpower. In order to illustrate this notion I’ve chose some documents dealing with social media. Is social media the new form of counterpower ? First, we’ll talk about couter culture and social revolutions in the 1960 in the US, then we’ll underline the radical rôle of social media in empowering citizens, and in the end we’ll see what the limits of social media are.
First of all, we’ll talk about counter culture and social revolutions in the 1960 in the US. In the US, « the sixties » were a decade marked by the rise of a counter-culture and the unfolding (déploiement) of different social revolutions which took place near the end of the decade. There were many causes to popular anger. Young people rebeled against the conservatism and social conformity and distance themselves from the capitalism and materialism which was so common during the era. There also was an anti-war movement : at the beginning, few Americans protested the American involvement in Vietnam but as the war dragged on and more young soldiers didn’t return home, the protest started growing. It ended in the massive Moratorium protests in 1969, and the movement of resistance to conscription. Furthermore, the means of protest were very numerous : while people demonstrated, artists expressed their anger trough songs or poems. Bob Dylan, for exemple, is said to be « the greatest living poet » fighting for his ideas through art. He denounces violence and the indifferent gouvernement in « Blowin’ in the wind ». The tune was well-known because it was originally a slave song that contributed to making it a very popular protest song.
Moreover, social media have a radical rôle in empowering citizens. Nowadays, every citizen can be a journalist. Electronic devices are ubiquitous (youbikwitos), they give access to information and are used to spread it. We heard an audio document in which David Thorburn sais that they can be used to protect citizens from unlawful arrests, from beatings by police. So it offers citizens an opportunity to record events that are happening as they occur. Even law enforcement uses social networking sites to catch and prosecute criminals. 67% of federal, state, and local law enforcement professionals think that "social media helps solve crimes more quickly." Social media sites help employers find employees and job-seekers find work. 64% of companies are on two or more social networks for recruiting. Also, it helps empower businessmen. In a video about social media’s political effects, we saw how social media facilitates political change. Social networking sites give social movements a quick, no-cost method to mobilize people. So social media empower people economically and politically. It can also help on making social changes and do social good on a community level. For example, social media shares popularized nine-year old Scottish student, Martha Payne, and her blog, "Never Seconds," which exposed the state of her school’s lunch program prompting international attention that resulted in changes to her school and the formation of "Friends of Never Seconds" charity to feed children globally.
Then, let’s talk about the limits of social media in empowering citizens. Social media enables the spread of unreliable and false information. In a text we read in class, Zuckerberg outlines Facebook’s ideas to battle fake news. Users of Facebook are spreading fake news and this phenomenon took a larger impact during the elections, because people could have been influenced by these fake informations. In another document, we learned that 49% of people have heard false news via social media. So empowering citizens with social media can be very dangerous. Then, criminals use social media to commit and promote crimes. Gangs use the sites to recruit younger members, coordinate violent crimes, and threaten other gangs. Even as a form of counter power, social media can lead to violence, which isn’t the best form of protest. Social media can also be used to involve young people in terrorist groups like ISIL
To conclude, there have always been many reasons for protests, and it seems that social media can be a new form of counter culture, empowering citizens. But we still have to pay attention to all the dangers of social media.