On Friday, NBC News’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel tweeted a photograph of an Egyptian demonstrator holding up a sign that reads, according to Engel, “Thank you Facebook.”

Only the word “Facebook” is written in English on the demonstrator’s sign, and while Engels claims that the Arabic writing says “thank you,”@chickgonebad left the following comment on the photo: “For what it’s worth, a friend fluent in Arabic tells me ‘It says thank you youth of Egypt.'”

and then later:

According to TechCrunch, Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper reported the following:

a twenty-something Egyptian man has named his first born daughter “Facebook” in tribute to the role the social media service played in organizing the protests in Tahrir Square and beyond.

read more at huffington post:

-Egyptian Father Names Baby ‘Facebook’

-Richard Engel Tweets Photo Of Egyptian Protesters With ‘Thank You Facebook’ Sign

Last week Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams sat down for an hour-long fireside chat in  San Francisco to answer all kinds of question about their company.

The part that i am interested is what they talked on Malcolm Gladwell’s article in which he tried to prove that the effect of online networks on social change is greatly exaggerated.

Ev, said Gladwell’s New Yorker article was “entertaining but kind of pointless”, and Biz said it was “absurd” to think that social networks were not “complementary to activism…It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable…Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous — but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible. If you can’t organise you can’t activate. I thought [the article] was entertaining but kind of pointless.”

In his argument, Gladwell cited the American civil rights movement of the late-fifties and sixties as an example of social change that was based on intimate friendship, suggesting that the “weak ties” connecting people online were not of the same influence.

“Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that [Martin Luther] King’s task in Birmingham, Alabama, would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail,” Gladwell argued.

Then they tried to give some example of activism : “It’s always been our goal to reach the ‘weakest signals’ all over the world, such as the recent usage in Iran and Moldova,”

I think biz  article in  reply to Gladwell also worths reading.

On its last issue of the year 2006, Time Magazine named “You” as its “Person of the Year”, today the different content types text, images, audio, video, customer reviews/feedbacks, educational content, mobile content, virtual content as well as citizen journalism are offered via lots of distribution platforms such as blogs, wikis (text-based collaboration formats), feedback-allowing sites like amazon.com, group-based aggregation like del.icio.us, podcasting, hosting sites like Youtube and Flickr, social networking sites like Facebook, virtual worlds like Second Life, some news sites and filesharing sites that in all of them the “text” is both written and read by the users of that platform. Such “text” is called User Generated Content (UGC) that with its growing power is re-shaping the way people read and write the “texts”, millions of “author” who are at the same time “interpreter/reader”. In particular, UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns and social interactions, empowering users/authors to nominate what is popular and important or valuable .

Although they started to appear with the idea of creating online content to provide facilities for amateurs to publish their own content, now these platforms are going to be the unique characteristic of future of the internet, “web 2.0” which designed on a UGC basis. On a Web 2.0 site, users can provide the data that is and also can exercise some control over that data.These sites may have an “Architecture of participation” that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it.

The low cost of coordinating creative efforts in the online environment also enables users to work together in creating new content without any firm organizational structure.

Along with the increase in volume of UGC available on the Internet at various web locations, UGC has become a vast collection of rich information. There are a number of queries which classic web searches cannot adequately address. For example, information about digital cameras can be found on respective company websites, but consumer feedback about these products (and services), such as the “zoom freezes sometimes when the flash is on”, comes from the end users themselves. The other good examples are wikipedia which is written and edited by users and twitter search engine which through it is possible to know about facts and rumours of recent or past events.

On his famous article “Morte d’Author/Death of the author” Barthes criticized the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author’s work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive “explanation” of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:”To give a text an Author” . UGC steps forward , now for the “reader/interpreter” it is not enough to have his/her “explanation” of the “text” anymore , it is time to have the physical rights of being an author to express directly his/her views. In fact, user generated content provides the context of authority, criticizes the classic meaning of publication and introduces more creative ( and sometimes anonymus) authors.

On the other hand, UGC might create a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their particular talents, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas.UGC seems to destroy the “aura” that had belonged to traditional means which through professionals and experts created the “text”. UGC is blurring the distinction between professional and amateur content. To a large extent, this dichotomy was based on a monopoly by publishers over the means of producing and mass distributing content. When everyone can produce high quality content by using such basic means as a cellphone camera, a keyboard, an internet connection, and can then make it publicly available worldwide, the dichotomy between professional and non-professional content collapses.

“When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people’s privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren’t worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally  flattened world of social media, those things aren’t as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After theelection in Iran, cries of protest from supporters of opposition candidate Mir-HosseinMousavi arose in all possible media, but the loudest cries were heard in a medium that didn’t even exist the last time Iran had an election.”

Lev Grossman , Times Online Wednesday, Jun. 17, 2009

Since last year the role that Twitter is playing in the nonviolent movement in Iran has been widely lauded. Time magazine dramatically called it the “medium of the movement,” and in July 2009 the U.S. State Department even asked the site to delay its scheduled maintenance so that the service would not be interrupted for Iranian users. See how important can Twitter actually be in a country where only 30 percent of the population has access to the internet

The rise of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace  is changing the way we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, how we work and how we do business on a daily basis. Millions of people use them everyday to keep up with friends, upload photos, share links and videos, Many companies have advertisements on them, and even governors have their pages and accounts there. There are many critics on them that they are questioning our privacy and it’s true.

On the other hand, I think the equal right of sharing that they gave to individuals makes a democratic space out of them, one primary school boy in Bhutan has facebook then Sarcozy and Berlusconi have facebook page, this equality is a sign of democracy . Social networks also help  economy, they are a good place for ads and so on.

Nowadays they are very important. here in australia they are  playing an increasingly large role in politics and election campaigns. Kevin Rudd had and now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have twitter account, they report what ever they do , and the are some pre-election statistics  based on how many people “like” them on Facebook and how many “followers” they have on twitter .

In some countries like Iran (my home country) , social networks (especially facebook) are the only means of connecting anti-government protesters to each other, they share the real news by the videos captured with their mobile phones, they set rallies time and even the anti-goverments leaders have their own page on facebook.

With all the pros and cons they exist and they are powerful and we can use their power  regarding our  willings.