Input Driving CIVIC Participation Through Social Media

Web 2.0's value is not in revolutionary technological change, it lies in the fundamental changes that have occurred in our underlying social processes. The value of new interactive tools lies not in their technological brilliance but in their ability to facilitate new methods of participation and support widespread social networks and issues-based agendas. The internet is becoming a ‘business as usual ’ tool for how we live, work, socialize and participate. We tend to focus on the transformational potential of informational and social digital networks but it is also important to understand how civil societies have evolved from being community-based and ideologically-driven to being based on economy and individualism. Democratic drift and political alienation are long standing problems in many countries. Beginning in the 1950s campaign-led NGOs, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Greenpeace, emerged as an early response to falling political satisfaction. Yet these megaliths of civil society now seem strangely out of place in an era of rapidly emergent viral campaigns and Facebook. Social media – the social web – is at the heart of a changing political and civic landscape, bringing together otherwise disparate individuals around shared beliefs. Weak ties – these networks of association – become pre