Brave New World

On March 28th 2009 at 8.30 the whole globe was mobilised to switch off the lights for an hour. Earth Hour, what the campaign is called takes place every year since the first time in 2007 in Sydney. The campaign is set up by the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF to raise awareness of the environmental issue of global warming.

As a main communication tool to gather all the people and to organise some kind of grassroot activism served several social media. An Earth Hour group was created in Facebook which has 900,131 members, Youtube videos were distributed (amateur as well as professional ones), Twitter was used to distribute the message and several blogs were posted about the campaign.

Using Clay Shirkey words: “It takes a village…”

For this kind of cause the use of social media seems the best way to engage people, especially when taking into account that the campaign took place all over the world. To quote Clay Shirkey again: “A story can go from local to global in a heart beat”. A group of people can be mobilised very quickly for the right kind of cause.

Another advantage of the use of new media in this case is that people were encouraged to tweet or blog about it and upload pictures and videos about their experiences during the actual event. Therefore the basis for the next campaign was already set.

George Marshall regards this campaign as the most mislead one of its kind. He calls it a small, simple act, which is easy to publicise. What is wrong with that?

Well, it might not reduce emission significantly but it raised awareness, especially when important places like the Eiffel Tower in Paris switch off their lights or Coca Cola agreed to switch off their billboard at time square for an hour.

It might be a small and simple act, but through an easy worldwide distribution of the message the main aim of the campaign was reached: creating awareness. And it is an event which not only gathers lots of people but it has promotion opportunities for organisations as well.

This will raise awareness on the one hand for Earth Hour itself and its cause and on the other hand serve as an incentive for the organisation to take part. Again Clay Shirkey: “Without plausible promise, all technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world”. 

As it is said in the Earth Hour group in Facebook: it’s about joining together and creating a vital conversation about the future of the planet – it’s as simple as a flick of the switch. And nothing more…

Clay Shirkey (2008) Here comes everybody. The power of organizing without orgnaizations London: Penguin Books Ltd.

When MEP for South East England Daniel Hannan delivered his attack on Gordon Brown on Wednesday in the European Parliament, the press didn’t pay much attention. But the public did. So it came that the video he posted on Youtube got the most hits in less time – 1,270,568 views until now and 8,752 comments so far, not just from English people.

The video spread like a virus through the Internet, with support of first Twitter, followed by links to several blogs.

The media didn’t feel that this speech was newsworthy obviously, but the public did.
That’s an obvious example of how the media turns into pull media. The whole communication process becomes people powered by people actively searching for the information they want to.

But that means for Public Relations as well as for the politicians to give up some control, as Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics states. And I guess that’s something what still scares some people. Understandably to a certain extend.

But democracy shouldn’t be about control anyway, rather than being about participation. And if politicians use these new tools attentive they can get a much closer look on what the people think, need and want, as through new media the thoughts, needs and beliefs of people are exactly reflected.

And then the “risk” of giving up control can be very rewarding in the end.

As Daniel Hannan states on his blog, it was really surprising for him how his speech hit the web. He posted videos like that since seven weeks, but they never got that much attention. And honestly, there are more entertaining videos on Youtube.

Maybe he just said what many people actually thought. Because I suppose people just get active, whether it is online or offline, when they see the need for a change.

A friend of mine made me aware of this Youtube video a few days ago, starring little David who is on his way home from a tooth surgery. He is still under the influence of drugs from the surgery and filmed in this condition by his father. 

I guess it is supposed to be funny and many people actually find it funny as can be seen on the 31,536 comments the video got – it even has helped some people to get through a bad day or tough times, as Davids father happily mentions on his “David after dentist” blog.

Thats just another example on how easy and quickly people can turn into ’someone’ in the web. I guess David and his family were just a normal family before his tooth surgery. 

Some people might recognise themselves somehow in the video, when your good friends post some party videos or pics on Facebook, showing you making a fool of yourself. The difference to David – we’re all adults and have (hopefully) chosen consciously to join Facebook and, well, getting in the condition on the pics.

That leads me to another point that catched my attention (obviously not just mine) in the last week: the briefly considered change of Facebook’s terms of use. Mark Zuckerberg and his friends refrained from activating these terms after many Facebook users commented against it. The basic change would have been that Facebook had the right to keep copies of user messages online, although the user has already signed off. 

But how do we know what really happens with all the information we publish in the web? And to what extend can real restrictions exist in the web? Another friend of mine called the web ‘lawless’ the other day – somehow I agree with him. I think the web is developing too fast to regulate it and it already circulates too much information to control theire use.

And what will little David think when he is old enough to realise the consequences of his tooth surgery? Probably he will not care, because he is born into a ‘culture’ where sharing of every moment in life is quiet common and also very transient. It might be considered as his past. The same with our data in several parts of the web – they’re part of our past – our web-past.