Black Lives Matter Summary

The issues of how technology is influencing our nation today has come into play with social media and surveillance in our personal lives. We use twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to express our opinions on things and as a voice to inform people on what’s going on in today’s society. We have learned how to use the tools we’ve been given to change our lives forever; our government has access to all of our personal information in exchange for our protection against terrorism. In Bijan Stephen’s article on “Black Lives Matter” and Rebecca McKinnon’s chapter on “the Arab Spring”, they both touch on the power of technology in negative and positive ways.

In Stephen’s article, he talks about how technology has helped in a positive way when it comes

to exposing the injustice actions directed towards the African American community. He explains how in the past “it took at of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going on in the streets of the Jim Crow South”. It was hard to get information or even help if you were African American, Stephen gives the example of not being able to use regular phone lines because they wouldn’t always be directed to help. Depending on the color of their skin influenced if they could get medical assistance if anything broke out. In other wards now and days Stephen states “The tools that we have to organize and to resist are fundamentally different than anything that’s existed before in black struggle”.
In addition, now that we have technology that can expose such things and open people’s eyes, Stephen explains how it’s now easier to be able to try to change this. He states how “Any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it and tailors its goals, tactics, and rhetoric to the media of its time”. Being able to shape the possibility’s is what technology is best at. It can either effect people in a negative or positive way by exposing todays issues or by adding fuel to the fire. It has changed and has helped us. Stephen explains how, “Still, this movement, as diffuse and protean as it may seem, has mounted some of the most potent civil rights activism since the ’60s. It helped secure the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol”. This shows how the debate between such matters has helped us obtain things as well, and with technology we have done that even more so.
To continue, Social media serves as an outlet but can affect people in a negative way as well according to Stephen, he states that “there are downsides to the media environment that today’s activists have adapted to. Despite its success in making videos of police violence go viral, social media itself has become another arena where black people are abused”. People are being verbally abused online and treated with disrespect because social media not only informs people but lets people express themselves in negative ways as well which adds more fuel to the fire.
As for surveillance of our personal lives, In McKinnon’s article she explains how “If such "back doors" are introduced, it's inevitable that criminals and repressive regimes will also be able to exploit them, enabling them to access to people's private communications, identify journalists' sources and gain knowledge of activists' plans”.

In her defensive she shows how exploiting our personal lives can cause problems and crimes that are not wanted. Sure, it helps us try to catch terrorism but in exchange it also leaves us defenseless against each other. Not everyone you think is on our side is on our side, especially those around

us.
In McKinnon’s eyes “pressure is mounting from politicians across the democratic world for global platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, to increasingly monitor and censor users, and flag more content for government agencies”. She explains how everything we use is being monitored in the governments advantage. Our private lives aren’t so private anymore. She tells how social media plays a role on exploiting our personal lives as well. She specifically uses the Arab spring as an example of this. For reference the Arab spring was a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions that spread across the Middle East in early 2011.
To compare, both McKinnon and Stephen had different views on how the power of technology plays a role in today’s society, but they both agree that technology has both changed and helped the world we live in today.

In Stephens article, he tells how “Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives with the force of a few thousand retweets”. He explains how technology can be used to push to change problems in our society and encourage us to get up and do something about it. Being able to use our capabilities if technology to fullest is “A huge reason for all this success is that, perhaps more than any other modern American protest movement, they’ve figured out how to marshal today’s tools”. In McKinnon’s explanation, she states how “To their credit, some companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook have joined forces with civil liberties groups in an attempt to persuade the Obama administration not to push anti-encryption measures that would enable government and law enforcement officials to access our secure communications”. This is goes with how technology can be used to make a difference just like what Stephen was saying in order to inform people on what’s going on. McKinnon explains how our social media servers have also taken a disagreement on invading our private lives. As it stands, any individual or

organization can report content that seems to be in violation of a company's terms of service and community guidelines. As Stephen states “Technology has helped make today’s struggle feel both different from and continuous with the civil rights era. All the terror and greatness we associate with that moment is right in front of our faces, as near to us as our screens”.