Social Media During The 2011 London Riots

We live in an era ruled by social media, primarily when it comes to teenagers, social media is used for everything. From communicating with family and friends to being used as a news outlet, and even advertisement for business and companies. This article is titled “Social Media: What's Not to Like,” written by Alison Pearce Stevens. The topic of this essay is the effect social media can have on teenagers. Social media, on one hand, can be used as a great way to share with the world and boost teens’ self-esteem. On the other hand, social media can be used as a place for bullying, body shaming and can cause depression or even suicide in teens.

Their actions alone sparked the revolution for sit-ins and silent protesting, contributing to the Civil Rights movement. The protesters didn’t put anything on social media that allowed their sit in at the diner to grow, but simply the sight of how “people spilled out onto the street”(Gladwell 400) that grabbed activists’ attention. Gladwell observes that in the absence of social media in these events, the protesters tend to be stronger, have emotional bonds, and be more organized. The people participating in the revolt had strong connections (strong-ties), due to the fact that they all share a high risk of consequences. Talking about the dangers starting on page 404, protesters faced violence from the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacists. Gladwell uses the examples of the revolutions in Moldova and Iran to show how while Facebook and Twitter did let people be “confident to stand up for freedom and democracy” (401), the use of that social media is a weak-tie. Social media helped bring awareness to these, but as Gladwell explains “social networks are effective at increasing participation-by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires” (408). He talks about how social

Social media has been a topic of debate for years. Some people are strongly against any use of it while others like the instant connection it provides. A major concern over social media is the lasting effects it has on teenagers. Social media can affect teenagers through many ways including things like their self-esteem. Cyberbullying is a raging topic of discussion centered around teens social media use. It can also effect their people skills and create a lack of community involvement. Some parents think that watching what their children do on social media is an invasion of privacy but is your concern for their privacy greater than your concern for their safety? Social media poses a great danger to today’s children. It can affect many aspects of their lives.

Besides friends using social media to connect with other friends or families keeping in touch with other relatives who are at a distance, in the recent years, terrorists have taken advantage of social media and used it as a platform to threaten and send jaw dropping messages to some of the most popular outlets across the nation. For this paper, I will examine how terrorists have used social media as propaganda. I will also analyze the trends in media and terrorism, and how it has provided access for the promotion of the violent messages as well as allowing the news of terrorist attacks and assassinations to reach many parts of the world within a matter of minutes.

We seem to be hyped up by the most recent innovations, mesmerized by the spectrum of conveniences and advantages that they can offer, without realizing the ominous aftermath of this ephemeral trend. In Eula Biss’ essay “Time and Distance Overcome,” an ingenious mind of the past sought to connect the households under a vast wire communication system to keep them more intact. When Alexander Graham Bell broadcasted the telephone and telephone poles with a grand project of constructing a social network, Thomas Edison eulogized its efficiency: Biss explicates how people of the past were at first fascinated by the idea that the human voice can be transmitted through telephone wires. However, no one would have speculated that the technology that was developed with a modest purpose of reuniting families via the human voice would be used as a tool to commit violence such as in race riots and lynching. To much surprise, the most benign form of telephone poles were used for hanging innocent Black people after they had been cut down half-alive, beaten to death with clubs, and even burned with oil.

Ryan Sorge Rachel Thomas Composition 1 4 September 2015 Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted Summary In the essay Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, The author Malcolm Gladwell, explains the pros and cons of how activism has transformed into social media, instead of social activism. Without social media, he explained that protests and large group gatherings can be arranged, without social media, successfully. High-risk activism has "strong-ties", while social media has "weak ties". Using the web has turned into a critical component in which the way people live today.

“Social media makes the community part of the actual crisis communication response. For example…Twitter was used to quickly share initial information and updates during the 2007 and 2008 California wildfires, 2008 Mumbai massacre, 2009 crash of US Airways Flight 1549, 2010 Haiti earthquake, and 2011 Tunisian uprising.” This information, again in Veil’s 2011 article, reinforces the idea of how social media communication is highly beneficial and furthers an individual’s ability to remain informed on current events.

The effect of and the role played by the social media during as well as after the Boston Marathon Bombing. It started with the Boston Police Department (BPD) had embraced the social media, because their deputies had been trained how to use Twitter in their daily activities. The BPD drew support from many people who were paying attention to the event through social media. This allowed them to advance the search for the perpetuators. The BPD used Twitter to keep the public informed about reports of additional bombing sites, fires around the city, and streets shutdown (Sylves, 2015; 138). The BPD used the social media to post surveillance photos of the suspects. Social media from the broadcast news station even report a suspect in custody and in transit to be arraigned; however, BPD quickly issues a tweet indicating that no suspect were in custody and no suspect were being transported to the courthouse for arraignment. Within

Basatneh ran a revolution from her laptop. All forms of resistance require a way of communicating and coordinating with other groups to maintain unity against the government controlled attacks. Social networking sites such as

The co-ordinated terrorist attacks induced fear in civilians within the zone of the attacks, many people were wounded and looking for shelter. However, through the use of the social networking website twitter, users began hash tagging ‘#PorteOuverte’ which translates to ‘door open’. Facebook also placed a ‘safety check’ on the website so that people who lived in france would be able to mark themselves as safe. Many users who used the hashtag #PorteOuverte were using the medium to speak out to people near the attacks and even posted their address in order for people to come for shelter. This shows that through social media, communication has increased and arguably improved social solidarity. However, this hashtag was also being used by people who were not living in Paris, offering their homes but by people who were touched by the kind acts shown among Parisians. This caused a difficulty as the hashtag began trending worldwide and would have caused more confusion, which illustrates that the modern medium of communication has faults which could have cost people their

The use of linguistic resources to subtly establish and reinforce dominance is seen in media tactics incessantly; for example, surrounding the terrorist attacks that occurred September 11, 2001. The media is used as an instrument of hate and misinformation, leaving subtle but clear messages about what Americans should believe regarding the crisis. Occupied territories become disputed territories, Jewish settlements become Jewish neighborhoods, and civilians killed by Israeli soldiers are simply caught in the crossfire. Furthermore, like Winston Smith, those who question the facts or deviate from the opinions that should be adopted are rendered with suspicion. Additionally, though citizens today are not under surveillance through telescreens like the citizens of Oceania, social media keeps close record of all activities. Telephone calls and browsing histories are accessible to the government, and social security numbers and zip codes are a part of everyday transactions. Data is collected, cameras record invisibly, and private lives are spied upon. Citizens today, too, are manipulated and watched through the

bomb threat. Cell phones are great things for communicating, but many people don’t just use

The 2011 uprising in Egypt was in many ways a traditional brick-and-mortar revolution, but with a cyber-twist to it: based on their statistical analysis of a large body of tweets related to the 2011 uprising in Egypt, Starbird and Palen (2012) observed that activists used Twitter as an important tool to share ideas and information with like-minded people, because Twitter allows a high number of activists interact using its retweet and other mechanisms. In this case, Twitter was used among participants and supporters of a traditional mass movement to bypass government controlled

CB radio is a two-way radio system that opens to the citizens used to get communication with the outside world at home. At last century CB radios are use by long-distance truck drivers, because of the speed limit, they share the road conditions information to avoid police. Also, do the underlying social and friendly chats. “The CB absence speaks to a number of biases within a field that tends to focus either on communications technologies whose content can be quantified or textually interpreted or on the ownership and distribution networks of corporate industry giants said to dominate media production, reception, and meaning creation” (Packer, J. 2008) The appear of CB radio leads people to have their own bias, give citizens the ability to create an individually oriented culture that allowed people more free speech, unlike in the past, people only listen to what

Social media sites allow millions of people to interact with friends,family and anyone around the world. A large portion of social media users are teenagers; researchers and parents both believe that social media is having a multitude of possible effects on teenagers. This literature review will analyze research of the positive and negative effects social media are having on today’s impressionable youth. Much of the research focuses on the age range of 10-16 from well-to-do families and college students. Understanding the online environment that teenagers live in can help parents relate to their children and teach then about the dangers and benefits of being on the Internet.