Social Media for Promoting Grassroots Political Movements and Social Change

Abstract

In light of many recent Internet-led revolutions, the Internet and its tools of social media have been heralded as instrumental in facilitating the uprisings. This chapter provides a close examination of the social media role in grass roots political and social change movements. The chapter discusses the ways activists have used social media tools for organizing and generating awareness of political mobilization and the characteristics of social networking that can be harnessed in a particular cultural and historical context to achieve collective political actions. The chapter also discusses long-established theories of communication to explain how social networking tools became appealing to the activists in these Internet-led movements. The chapter will look at various Internet-led political movements around the globe to demonstrate the enormous potential of social networking tools to facilitate and expedite political mobilization.