random mussings

Just read an article on how social media has become big inbringing about social change. However, I guess that Internet has become vital to change in societies which are oppressed places where the Internet is perhaps the only medium of free expression. In such places like the Middle East, people communicate their genuine feelings on the internet and people take it seriously.

I don't want to comment on how is Internet affecting social change in India but at least in my surroundings, my friends dismiss social networking as a waste of time when I see it as a new medium of communication. Nobody thinks reading a blog is a useful exercise and my efforts at Internet advocacy and teaching people to blog have earned very little results. 

Out of the five people I tried to teach; only one has taken up blogging. (read his blog here)

People have raised issues like medium of instructions and mining in goa on the internet but the way I see it, the campaign has not made much of a social impact. People in Egypt coordinated   demonstrations using social networking. I tried to organize a party using social networking and the move terribly failed. May be it was because it was just a party. But I time and again wonder how I can get people to take social networks seriously and dabble successfully in citizen journalism.

How do I get there?

I tried to build a story on mining in goa using storify but could not find much information because not many people talk about the subject online. Here’s the story