By K.A. Laity
With news that Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has taken to Facebook to try to address the skepticism of its citizens (with the predictable results: a few thousand apparent likes and more than four times that number of skeptical comments), one might be inclined to think that here's a good indication of the importance of social media. The titular head of the authoritarian nation turns to Facebook to appeal to the hive mind of his nation after predictably dodgy election results.
Up in Scotland two young men have been convicted for three years for starting a riot in Dundee page on Facebook at the height of the UK riots this summer, which I suppose demonstrates that threats of violence on social media are going to be taken seriously—well, threats of violence against property anyway, not so much against women. As the Twitter joke trial demonstrated, fear of the power of social media seems to be much greater than the actual threat most of the time.
Besides, anyone who takes to social media to brag of their exploits usually gets caught.
Charlie Brooker's first episode of Black Mirror, "The National Anthem," suggested that the sheer force of Twitter had the power to move the PM to unnatural acts. It's an awesome power that most small businesses and local charities wish they could tap into more directly than begging ubertweeters like Stephen Fry or Margaret Atwood to give them a retweet.
But it still seems that we're a bit unsure exactly how powerful or pervasive it is—how many of the uses of it are truly effective? Just as every self-published success story masks thousands and thousands of hopeless and often aimless failure stories, the relatively few successes of social media (mostly celebrities or else cute kittens who profit nothing from their fame!) suggest there remains a lot to sort out. For every Facebook miracle or social media psycho killer there are millions of people who use it without fanfare or grave danger just to be social.
Maybe the biggest story is how effortlessly it has become a ubiquitous facet of our daily lives.