Revolution from the Comfort of Home
In class this week, we watched “#ChicagoGirl.” This is a documentary about a 19 year old girl organizing a revolution against the Syrian regime from Chicago. In the first few minutes of the film, I was skeptical about how effective this college student was in making a difference from so far away. To me, Facebook is used for frivolous tasks. Seeing how people are creating Facebook events to organize protesters to come to a common area to be more effective is amazing. The day and age we live in and the technology that is at our finger tips is so much more powerful than what we use it for.
The documentary presented decades-old regimes falling in a matter of days because protesters were documenting the tragic events that were taking place and posting it to social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and more. People are able to document like never before and this evidence that is circulating is more than enough to bring these regimes down. People are outdoing themselves with finding different ways to use technology, whether it’s breaking down various countries’ firewalls to allow people access to social media or coordinating with people effectively to induce an information cascade to fuel the revolution. People from all over the world, fighting for the same cause feel so connected because of the ease at which they are able to communicate with each other through social media.
The difficult part about the Syrian government is that they have seen these other regimes fall and they are learning from their mistakes. The end of the revolution is hard to determine, but more and more young people are being looked at as heroes because of what technology is allowing them to accomplish. Technology is a powerful thing and the way we use it determines our culture.
