SMS
RSS feeds
Reddit
NewsvineOn Feb. 4, millions of Colombians marched in international rallies against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel group.
Enlarge
The idea for the worldwide protests began with a group on Facebook.
Daniel Espinosa ‘09 first became aware of the group’s existence when it appeared in his Newsfeed shortly after its inception in early January. Espinosa, originally from Cartagena, Colombia, decided to contact the head of the anti-FARC protest in San Francisco to see if he could help make signs and banners for the rally. He also called his mother in Cartagena the next day to see if she would help a friend who was organizing a similar protest in his hometown.
“In Colombia, not everyone has access to a computer,” Espinosa said. “But the students got excited and got everyone else involved.”
While only about 715,000 Colombians are currently on Facebook, an estimated 4.8 million people participated in the country’s rallies. Espinosa said the large turnout was the result of Colombians’ near-universal hatred of FARC and the transparency in the planning process on Facebook, which served as a launching pad for the rallies.
“It was not possible without the use of Facebook to organize the ideas [for the rally],” he said. “You also know it wasn’t one or two people contributing ideas but a whole bunch of people. It was very democratic.”
The event came as no surprise to B.J. Fogg ‘95 Ph.D. ‘97, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab. He believes that relationships formed on social networking sites have the ability to persuade millions of people to get involved in movements by taking one-on-one personal relationships and putting them onto a mass scale. According to Fogg, this the greatest step forward in mass persuasion since the advent of radio.
“Peace is possible now that we have the tools to reach many people through the social networking sites,” Fogg said. “Mass inter-personal persuasion makes it possible for us to change the world in the next thirty years.”
Fogg plans to launch an initiative at Stanford to begin a dialogue on the use of technology to bring about peace. Tentatively called the Center for Peace Technology, it will not define the peace or state the solutions but simply open the door to discussion of peace technology.
“We’re still in the alpha-stage of this initiative,” he said. “Just think of how far the Internet has come in the past ten years.”
Fogg has been studying the effect of computer products on people’s attitudes and behaviors for over a decade at Stanford. His goal is to understand the potential of persuasive technology so that it can be used to help end global conflict.
In the next three decades, Fogg believes that current Facebook users will mature into the world’s leaders and applications for social networking sites will mature along with them. Although Facebook remains primarily a recreational tool for many of its users, Fogg believes that current perceptions and uses of Facebook are not an indicator of what it could be used for in the future.
“Social networking sites allow people to use inter-personal persuasions on their social groups,” he said. “The channel [of communication] is trusting and it’s very fast. It allows normal people to have a huge global impact.”