Design to Thrive

The power of social media to effect change

Any fundamental shift in the ways that human beings are able to share information has the potential for extraordinary sociopolitical impacts. And looking at the history of the Internet, we've certainly seen evidence to suggest that new social media are, as Jeff Jarvis puts it in What Would Google Do, “going to change everything” ([7], 27). Over 20 years ago now, even though the traditional news organizations were initially unable to report what was going on in Tiananmen Square, those of us on the Internet were reading reports from Chinese students about the atrocities there within minutes of the events. Back then we claimed that the way Chinese protesters used the networking technologies and the Internet ...