Review: “Political Turbulence: How social Media shape Collective action”
“In 2003 millions of people were mobilized in eight hundred cities across the world, including two million in London February 15, to demonstrate against their states’ involvement in the Iraq war, The largest protest in Human history until that time.” This historic protest is the biggest example of the dynamic analyzed in this book, the power of social media in building collective action in the world of politics. Through different studies and experiments, it is shown that the rise of social media has changed not only the way we participate politically, but the world of politics itself. As someone that enjoys both politics and social media, it was great to discover how interrelated they have become, and that there really is a big difference in how politics have changed once social media became present.

Blogs and the rise of content online
Its easy now days to take all the online content for granted but it was interesting how reading this put in perspective how content generation became a huge turning point in the political world by introducing Blogs and user based sites that allowed ordinary people to generate their own content to express their own opinions and intensify their participation. I thought it was important to emphasize this because most of the social media services that exist now have grown due to the ability to share content but this content and the ability to create it was not always there. This development started in the early 90’s with weblogs or blog hosting services such as (blogger, open diary, live journal etc). Prior to these online tools, political information was only provided by professional organizations or parties themselves, in a way it was limited, but most importantly, it did not trigger the engagement that online content provides. One of the biggest online content sources that is not necessarily associated with social media is Wikipedia, however, this web based free content encyclopedia, started in 2001 largely written collectively by many internet users, it’s goal is to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under free license” so in a way, and specially in this context, it can be understood as one of the biggest social media tools that has engaged people in the political world, it does not network like the typical social media services do, but it does bring a huge engagement and collective effort to build a public good. By 2014 Wikipedia had nearly half a billion unique visitors monthly, making it one of the top 10 (behind Facebook, google, and youtube) most visited sites in the world.

Social Media & Tiny Acts of participation
Content generation was just the beginning, by introducing social media services that allowed us to easily share information, we collectively became more involved in political action. Social media took a huge role in us being able to organize without organizations, the ability to individually share, comment, discuss and collaborate brought a new dimension to the political world never seen before. participation such as updating your Facebook status, making a micro donation, liking a political Instagram post, sending a tweet or tweet, etc. All these acts that were not available before social media may seem insignificant, but collectively have become a huge force. Many popular and movements have now been mobilized and organized by these tiny acts of participation that in a big scale move on to make a huge impact via campaigns, protest political movements etc. Youtube for instance became a huge tool for political influence thanks to The Obama campaign during the 2008 presidential election, The official channel had over 250 million views by 2014 with content shared and contributed by supporters. Twitter for instance was also credited for a huge role in helping gather the support in protest against allegedly rigged elections in Iran in 2009 and the Tunisian revolution in 2011. In some of these instances, were the political environment and involvement can be dangerous, social media becomes even more valuable and important since it gives people a safe way to support a cause that through other mediums may put them in danger or threaten their lives. Whether its Facebook, youtube, twitter, or any social media service, these tool have helped us contribute through tiny acts to become a huge influence for political events.

Visibility and social information
There are many experiments and studies done in this book that explore the influence that social media has on the political world, but also that it has on us and our willingness to participate. Out of all the experiments and analysis this one stood out the most and it is the concept that resonates the most with me in this book: the idea that social media puts a spotlight on our actions by making it public and the fact that we have access to the publics information pretty much on the spot. Before social media political participation was mostly done through memberships, it was relatively private, and the information regarding what others might be thinking about was based on polls or resources that were not as accessible to us, but most importantly, there was no live statistics showing us who supports what, there was not much access to the social information that shapes the way we think. For instance, one of the biggest examples in social media history about this idea is the infamous “Ice bucket challenge” although this was done to raise money to benefit ASL research and not for political purposes, it does show how the idea of you being exposed to the public along with the huge statistics showing the support it was getting, it generated this huge viral campaign and engagement. by 2014 there 2.4 million tagged videos in Facebook in august alone and more than 14 million videos in general. Wikipedias article views grew form 163,000 to 2.89 million in August. The ALS association received more than 100 million in the end. This campaign really shows how the form of visibility can influence us to participate. There are may more factors and forms that this book discusses, but in my opinion, it is the fact that we have all these social statistics and social information along with our image being so public in the social media environment that really influences how we behave. I highly recommend this book to anyone that would like to have a better understanding of how influential social media has become to the political world but also our behaviour in general.