‘Global Civil Society’ and the Internet 2012: Time to Update Our Perspective

TL;DRAbstract

To date, there are around 2 billion people using the internet (see Chapter 5 this volume, Figure 5.1). The 750 million active users of the social network site Facebook share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month (Facebook Statistics 2011). Each minute more than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube (YouTube Blog 2011) and 3,000 new pictures are shared on Flickr, which in September 2010 had a stock of 5 billion images (Flickr Blog 2010). Each day around 200 million 140-character-messages are sent via Twitter; this is the equivalent of a 10-million-page book per day, or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Twitter Blog 2011). Social media services, such as Twitter, have not only become an integral part of people’s daily lives, but these days also guide military strategies, such as the NATO strikes in Libya (Norton-Taylor and Hopkins 2011), and play a considerable role in contemporary mass activism (see Chapter 3 this volume).

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper