Societal Impact
The dissemination of first hand accounts and videos, both live and pre-recorded, of state reactions to protests in Tunisia and Egypt in January 2011 served to raise visibility of the actions of the states, and may have spurred growth in the protests. The impact was significant enough that after initial attempts to block specific sites, Egypt ultimately shut down all internet access for a period. Notably, the primary recording device in these revolutions was the mobile phone. In this context, inverse surveillance was used in complement to social networks.
Read more about this topic: Sousveillance
Famous quotes containing the words societal and/or impact:
“Society’s double behavioral standard for women and for men is, in fact, a more effective deterrent than economic discrimination because it is more insidious, less tangible. Economic disadvantages involve ascertainable amounts, but the very nature of societal value judgments makes them harder to define, their effects harder to relate.”
—Anne Tucker (b. 1945)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)