Chapter Three
Impact on People’s Lives
Nowadays, social media are a reality and they are becoming more and more important and central to daily life, motivated by business and personal interests. The growth of SM’s importance also implies a development of intrinsic power and, in some situations, SM contributes to accomplishing goals in business and personal life. To evaluate the impact on people’s lives, this chapter will analyse the influence of SM in three major areas:
1. Politic;
2. Business;
3. Society.
This chapter report practical examples of past and current uses of SM that have changed the World and analyses what SM really represent for the individuals.
3.1 Are Social Media for Everyone?
There is a Latin proverb that says “Verba volant, scripta manent”, which means “Spoken words fly away, written words remain”. This proverb should always be in mind when using SM, because whatever is shared, posted or stored on the Internet, will remain forever. In fact, the Internet does not forget and does not lose anything.
With this statement I want to underline that when a message is sent or an opinion or comment is released or posted, nobody can forbid the “receivers” from saving a copy for their purposes, and the senders should expect that their content can be kept and used against them in due time.
SM is an easy and quick way to multiply personal connections for three main reasons: business, entertainment and information.
The entirety of SM is regulated by common sense and by few legal rules; they favour the freedom of expression (almost in democratic countries) and there are almost non-existent limits to use these media.
I also suggest looking at SM as one big database, where personal information circulate and are stored (e.g. in a social network, in the cloud or in web chats). The main characteristic of this big database is that it is self-updated and self-powered, and can be a megaphone of a person’s life. This can also bring about negative consequences, as analysed later in this book.
If I had to define SM system with one word, I would say that it is a set of tools (with the characteristics described in section two) and tools do not harm anyone if the user knows how to use them. To be more specific, they are tools for today’s communication, and if they are used with a lack of care, or for unlawful activities, they can hurt somebody else or the users themselves.
People should also not be afraid of this new media. For example, I hear many parents saying that they need to control their kids’ social networks, I believe that the priority is to educate the kids how use SM and how defend from possible threats coming from them. In this way it is possible to prevent possible problems and make them understand the risks.
Somebody also asked me if there should be some limitation to SM by law, such as an independent organisation to control our chats, emails, postings, videos, identity, etc. But don’t we have already a clear law that protects us from illicit, harmful and illegal actions? Does a massive and extended privacy restriction really help and, besides, who and what will be the right organisation or individual to control the controllers? In general, restrictions have never made a society evolve.
3.2 Political impact
In the last few years we have seen many revolutions or revolts that were started, organised and documented using SM. There have also been situations when political campaigns involved SM to win the elections and when SM influenced public opinion and changed human behaviour.
One of the major cases was the “Arab Spring”. In 2011, the Islamic world faced a big political change. Countries such as Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Bahrain were in revolt. People fought against their government for more democracy and freedom. Anyone in the world with the Internet connection could watch the live images coming from those countries in revolt via Facebook, web streaming or YouTube.
In contrast to the past years, when information was processed and spread by traditional media, nowadays any news can be reported by anyone, and broadcast in real time. Users decide if the information is relevant or not, interesting or not and, in this case, can choose to share it with their followers, and so the process repeats itself.
Reported below are some famous cases where SM was essential for the creation and development of the events:
a) The first important episode to recall is the Philippines event. In October 2000, the former President J. Estrada was in middle of a corruption scandal. In January 2001, it escalated to a people’s protest. This happened when a dedicated court, assigned to the impeachment, forbade opening an envelope containing possible evidence of the President’s involvement in the scandal. The Court stated that this evidence was not part of the impeachment process and this means that it should not be taken in consideration.
In few hours, hundreds of thousands of angry text messages circulated among the population against the verdict. People flooded the streets of Manila becoming a serious threat to the security of the nation. After three days of protests, the military took the side of the population and Estrada had to resign from presidency.
This was the first important episode involving SM that affected an important political resolution. In those circumstances, SM was able to highlight a judicial court decision that was wrong for the population, which then organised a revolt.
b) In December 2010, a T