I know its a long shot, but if you watch the entire twenty-two minute video I’m about to feature, it should bring you into a spiral of thought, emotion, and eagerness to make change in the country- from whatever (political) side you are on. In “Charlottesville: Race and Terror,” produced by VICE News Tonight on HBO, a young woman is featured following the Charlottesville white supremacist rally and protests in August 2017. The footage includes her discussing the events with a white supremacist throughout the day and different clips of the protests and clashes that took place between the two groups. What comes to mind for me, as a student studying how technology effects the world and various social movements, I feel as though technology in the most simplest sense changes the way information is collected and distributed; in other words, the fact that this video exists and has been viewed by millions upon millions of people shows how important of a role technology plays in promoting the virality of different online movements because this event was monumentally important to todays political climate. Through the use of video and being able to post it on various social media sites, such as Youtube, may have allowed the video to reach a much larger audience than had the events of that day been only regurgitated by newspapers or word of mouth. Regardless of your views and political affiliation I believe that technology and social media can and have played a huge role in recent politics, such as in the presidential election, Memes about the president or political figures, and online news sites that allow the spread of viral articles and news.
In other events of politics and technology, in the article The Meticulously Engineered Grassroots Network Behind the Bernie Sanders Revolution by Sasha Issenberg, it was noted that a lot of the communication from Bernie supporters and campaign leaders took place via E-mail and texting, which is definitely something that is new, exiting, and innovative. By using these new forms of communication (compared to older forms of calling landlines, going door to door, and sending mail,) it allowed supporters and campaign leaders to communicate quickly, efficiently, and it allowed more people to be easily contacted in large quantities. Although some of the recent modern technology (texting, technology that allow someone to make multiple texts to mass amounts of people, and sites like Youtube) is somewhat new(ish) to politics, I believe it has made a great impact. Do you agree? How much more is today’s technology capable of doing in terms of helping share views and news?
Charlottesville: Race and Terror. VICE News Tonight on HBO. [Video file]. (2017, August 14). Retrieved October 23, 2017, from https://youtu.be/P54sP0Nlngg
Issenberg, S. (2016, February 24). The Meticulously Engineered Grassroots Network Behind the Bernie Sanders Revolution. Retrieved October 23, 2017, from http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/features/2016-02-24/behind-bernie-sanders-revolution-lies-a-meticulously-engineered-grassroots-network
