How can
communication on Twitter contribute to community empowerment?
Ikki Ueda
Image: Communication on Twitter (Admin, 2017)
Communication is one of the
essential parts of our daily lives. In fact, the way to communicate with other
people is not only face to face talk, but also through online social network,
such as Twitter. The main difference between these two methods of communication
is that online social network is faster and easier to spread information to a
large number of people. For instance, the aim of Facebook is to produce power
to share and to provide more connections with other people in the world (McNell,
2012). That is, online social network has
increased the size of communication, and it unites people more than before
(Kuttainen, 2017). Essentially, one of the ways to make use of this strength is
community empowerment.
One of well-known example of
community empowerment was the Ice Bucket challenge, which can demonstrate how
online social network has impacted on society. This challenge is simply to overturn
the ice bucket over the head, but the action behind this was to help the
research for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis [ALS] (Sample & Woolf, 2016). ALS
is the disease that damages tissues in the nervous system affecting our
movement severely, and this disease is known as fatal disease (‘Amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis’, 2017). Because numerous people on Twitter were curious
about this challenge, more and more people shared it with other users or did
this challenge. Green (2014) showed the statistics about this challenge that it
reached over 400 million with 10 billion views, and it generated $100 billion
donations for ALS patients. It is can be seen that it is possible for online
social network to change our society for social justice.
It is significant to find out
how Twitter is efficient to make the real world good from this case. The main
feature of Twitter is that it has the ability to inform certain social concerns
toward many people in order to evoke our self-awareness in society. The mechanisms
behind this is that Twitter can spread information instantly by retweeting. A ‘retweet’ refers to a post that has
been shared by people who are different to the original users (‘Retweet’,
2017). That is, the more people retweet this campaign on Twitter, the more we
are likely to come across this challenge. Another factor is that some famous
people, such as Mark Zuckerberg and George W. Bush were involved this Ice
Bucket challenge for community empowerment (Sample & Woolf, 2016).
Essentially, this type of person has a wide range of social connections in the
virtual world, and they are highly persuasive people too. Thus, the involvement
of these people was the effective way to communicate with many people so as to
promote how this challenge is important for community empowerment. In
conclusion, it is possible for online social network to change the real world
in a positive way.
References
Amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis. (2017). In The free dictionary. Retrieved
from http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/amyotrophic+lateral+sclerosis
Communication on
Twitter. [image] (2017). Retrieved from http://thestudentlawyer.com/2017/02/20/twitter-quarterly-loss-reaches-167-million/
Green, R. K.
(2014). 7 reasons why we are fascinated with the #IceBucketChallenge. Retrieved
from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/r-kay-green/7-reasons-why-we-are-fasc_b_5945010.html
Kuttainen, V.
(2017). BA1002: Our space: Networks,
narratives, and the making of place, lecture 6: Power. [PowerPoint slides].
Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au
Mcneill, L.
(2012). There is no ‘I’ in the network: Social networking sites and posthuman
auto/biography. University of Hawai’i
Press, 35(1), 65-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23540933
Retweet. (2017). In
Dictionary.com. Retrieved from
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/retweet
Sample, I., &
Woolf, N. (2016). How the ice bucket challenge led an ALS research breakthrough.
Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jul/27/how-the-ice-bucket-challenge-led-to-an-als-research-breakthrough
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