The global information exchange network and the Egyptian Revolution
The news article I found for my blog is about the Egyptian Revolution which happened last year. The people of Egypt were uprising against the government – corruption, freedom of speech, lack of free elections, to name a few. At first it started off with little people knowing about it, but then in a very short period of time, this event gained global attention, and what was interesting about it was that social media played and important role not only help spread awareness about the issue, but to also organize crowdfunding initiatives and protests.
This definitely relates to what we have learned in class because in this case, social media was an agent for information exchange, and we can view this as a network of information exchange. In class, we learned about how in a friendship network, the nodes represent people and the edges are their friendship, but not all networks are friendship networks. Information exchange between different people/devices/computers can also be a network. In this case, the nodes will be the people/devices/computers, and the edges connecting them to each other will be the access to information between the two.
I think that this information exchange network is a good example of a cycle network – everything is connected, and even if you remove an edge, one node will still find a way to connect to another node. For example, once you share a piece of information on the internet, it becomes distributed and stored – people will share it and copy it, and even if you take down one site that contains the information, people will still have access to that piece of information because it has been copied and distributed around so much. For example, if one friend shares this issue on his Facebook news feed, then all his Facebook friends can access this information and share it to all the people they know. So in the cycle network, even if one edge is removed and person cannot access the information from source A, he or she can still go through a path of several edges and find the same information from source B, since everything is connected. The reason why the news was able to spread so fast through the internet was because there are simply a lot of connections in the network – millions of people are on the internet, and people knowing about the piece of information will just rapidly increase.
In the case of Egypt Revolution, information was exchanged across the globe through the internet, and it is astonishing to see how fast the information gets shared through by people, and there are so many connections that it is almost impossible for a piece of information to completely disappear off the internet once it gets shared. Not only did this information exchange network allow this issue to be stored and distributed, but these connections also helped people with shared beliefs to join together to fight for a cause.
Here is the link to the article: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/09/how-social-media-is-keeping-the-egyptian-revolution-alive256.html
– Daniel