Has communication become as complex as the devices themselves?

• Author: Cintron, Ramon Quinones

"the Times They Are A-Changin'".(1) Or are they? I believe times have already changed. More than we could have imagined. Our ability to communicate has changed dramatically in the last twenty years, from the advent of the mobile phone to the proliferation of laptop computers, and then the marriage of both into smartphones. As technology continues to advance into more versatile and effective ways to communicate, the way we use these methods are almost as complex as the devices themselves. This increases our scope and reach as individuals and, subsequently, as groups of individuals in search of a common goal or ideal. That's why, with the arrival of social media services across new technology sources, activist groups and social institutions alike are finding a changing way to spread their messages and organize their activities.

With new technology, the interfaces through which we can add and actively talk to friends and upload and share information and media have become a powerful tool the likes of which humanity has not seen before. The recent surge of social media sites and services has started an internet "boom" of user-generated content. And while it seems that most of this content is whimsical in its nature (see YouTube videos like David after the Dentist, Twitter accounts like Feminist Hulk, and Facebook status posts from historical figures like Galileo and the Pope), recent examples of organizations and institutions that have incorporated the use of these tools show that they're very effective for purposes other than mere entertainment.

Social media, which for the purposes of this article will be considered as the group of online sites and services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, has been repur-posed by activist organizations all over the world. Social media facilitates the aggregation of interests, letting users "like" certain groupsproducts, ideas, etc., and follow the pages linked to these objects. People who like pages find themselves able to share interests with others and receive regular updates on whatever they've liked. These services increase the reach of these organizations, providing them with the means to spread their message beyond the scope of traditional media. For example, the computational matrix Wolfram-Alpha estimates that Facebook.com receives around 6.8 billion daily page views, with around 540 million daily visitors.(2) While not all users are likely to view the pages of specific activist groups and...