// posted by nestorvperez // 07.28.2008 at 9:54 pm //

Rise of the 5th power: Facebook and the Colombian social movement.

The Protests against the FARC in Colombia on February 4, 2008 drew millions of Colombians in over 27 cities in the country and in over 104 worldwide.

The protest in Colombia turned out to be the biggest in the country’s history “The national police operations commander, General José Riano, said an estimated 4.8 million people turned out for 365 marches in the country. International protests were held mainly in Latin America, but some marches took place in Europe, Asia and the United States.”

“Spain’s EFE news service put the number of marchers worldwide at more than 10 million.”

Traditional resource mobilization theory states that there is a high cost involved to create and mobilize people as a social movement. With the internet, however, the costs of organizing people are negligible, if not zero. We often hear about the three traditional powers being the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. After the advent of newspaper, television and radio a fourth power that influenced all three came about: known as the traditional media. Now we could say that the internet and social media is giving rise to a 5th Power in which this facebook phenomenon fits in.

To analyze the success of the Colombian protests one must put the facts into the context.

•  The FARC is the oldest guerrilla movement in the world and has been trying to overthrow the Colombian government for over four decades.
• The FARC claim to follow a marxist ideology but in reality are now the armed wing of a narcotics business.
•  Protests came as a reaction mainly to the FARC’s lies about the whereabouts of a child they claimed was in their custody and their reluctance to release more hostages unilaterally.
•  Mass demonstrations don’t have a history in Colombia.
•  Cornerstone of current Colombian administration’s policy is weakening FARC militarily.
• FARC protests endorsed by the Colombian government.

The protest started as a group called 1.000.000 voices against FARC and due to its exponential growth shortly after its creation Oscar Morales, the creator, and his friends decided to organize a national march. “Oscar invited 20 friends, which is the maximum number of invites you can send in a 24-hour period. In less than 12 hours the group had more than 900 members, tripling the number of users every day after that.” The traditional media in Colombia akin to the governments agenda gave widespread publicity to the group and were instrumental in galvanizing the protests beyond facebook to the general public.

Facebook is only a spec of the much bigger picture that is Social Media. The rise of the 5th power is now evident not only through facebook but also text messaging. President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines was ousted from office in 2001 by what he called a “coup-de-text”. The Colombian protests have shown that social movements are now cheap to start and social capital is cheap to harness. Similar organizations have been created for other causes such as the pro democracy protests in Myanmar by the monks. The potential for growth of political movements using social media is immense and their success is now up to their ability to harness this power.

International Herald Tribune

PBS

// Tagged terrorism, protest, social movement, Featured