Phenomenal

Television executive Ashton Kutcher, a few weeks ago, did something that many thought was patently insane. He challenged the global cable TV network CNN to a duel, a race on who could first enlist one million supporters on the social networking medium Twitter.

CNN executives accepted the challenge. One could imagine that they did so with a wry smile: how could one individual challenge a whole network?

Then, lo and behold, Kutcher beat the network. CNN accepted defeat and promptly donated 10,000 mosquito nets to support the challenger’s anti-malaria advocacy work in Africa.

Everybody perked up and looked at the phenomenon more closely. How could an individual, albeit with a morally impeccable advocacy, beat a network with global influence?

We have taken notice of the phenomenal growth in reach and influence of social networking sites like Friendster and Facebook. We have heard about Twitter and the growing constituency of “Tweets.”

The Obama campaign did successfully challenged the Democratic Party establishment and went on to win the Presidency of the United States by tapping into the power of social networking media. He put together the best financed presidential campaign in US history on the back of $5 donations from grassroots support groups. His campaign mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers for small meetings in living rooms, plotting ten thousand ways to deliver the candidate’s message and bring out the vote.

Lodged in the White House, Obama continues to consolidate his grassroots support base through the social networking media. Recall how, in the first days of his presidency, Obama went over the heads of the traditional political hierarchies, addressing directly his popular base, to pressure the US Congress to pass the stimulus package he felt was urgently needed to fight off a severe recessionary cycle.

Campaign strategists the world over are still closely studying the case of the Obama electoral movement for lessons that might be applied in other settings. They haven’t yet distilled their insights when the Kutcher challenge appears to have (again) rewritten the rules of the game.

There are some truly important things the Kutcher challenge suggests. It tells us that the structures of power in the “real” world might be radically reversed in the world of digital communications.

In the “real” world, information is filtered by brokers and mediators. Power and influence are distributed through formal public institutions and corporate structures. The mass media and the political parties tell ordinary people how to think and what to choose.

In the world of social networking media, it is the ordinary people who report their realities directly to audiences matching the magnitudes reached by the mass media. We saw, in that dramatic plane landing on the Hudson River a few months ago, how “Tweets” and ordinary mobile phone users provided the rest of the world with images of the event way ahead of the television networks.

In previous years, it was difficult to imagine the concept of cyber-communities: groups of people bound together by shared interests independent of physical distance, political and religious boundaries and even language barriers. With the facility enabled by the social networking media, ordinary people routinely get together to form opinions, decide on common action platforms and otherwise redefine the traditional parameters of political constituency. All these happens independent of traditional notions of societal authority and political allegiance.

In another age, these new networking media might have been classified as “subversive.” Indeed they are: there is no means available to the modern state to police the endless stream of political opinion, moral judgments and social advocacies fostered in the networking sites. China’s Leninist “people’s democracy” has faced the worldwide web with utter exasperation. The only way to tame the power of social networking media is to make computers inaccessible to the population as in Cuba or North Korea.

Today, we are wont to yield to the power of these networking sites and recognize them to be the emergent form of cyber-democracy. People may distrust their leaders and the existing brokers of opinion; but they will always trust their friends. There lies the phenomenal rise in the influence of social networking sites: they are driven by the trust invested by participants in their peers in these cyber-communities.

On the eve of an election year, our politicians are more then keenly interested in the rising power of cyber-communities. They are hiring advisers and consultants to set up web pages, maintain their presence in the social networking media and attempt to build up their own following in the main networks.

As a general rule, however, most of the existing efforts of politicians are motivated by a desire to exploit cyber-communities, subordinate the social networking media to their conventional political agenda, and recruit blogger groups to their self-serving causes. That will all be futile, however.

It might be hard for traditional politicians to understand that the new web-based social movements are driven by empowerment from below, not subordination to the existing social hierarchies. The new media are egalitarian, spontaneous and, yes, anarchic.

See how Kutcher beat CNN. One individual with the correct cause can defy the old aristocracy. That is the new logic of cyber-democracy.

The cyber-communities could not possibly be colonized by the traditional political parties. But can these independent virtual communities also convert into a potent force in the field of traditional politics?