Have You Experienced Groundswell?

Have you ever imagined that if you posted an incident of violence on social media, will the police investigate the incident immediately? The most likely scenario is that no one pays attention to your post and several days later, the post will be drowned by the huge flood of information on the Internet.

Then, if there are 1,000,000 social media accounts reposting it or posting blogs with the topic, what will happen? The police will act quickly, the media like newspaper, TV will report the incident comprehensively, people will help finding out the perpetrator. People unit on the Internet and become strong and powerful.

This is not a theoretical scenario. This is what happened in Yunnan Province, China. A young lady was on the trip in Yunnan. One day, when she had dinner in a restaurant talking with friends, a group of local men imitated and made fun of her accent. The young lady expressed her displeasure to them, trying to stop them. Can imagine what happened next? Those men didn’t stop and even became angry. They attacked the young lady, assaulting her hardly on the face. Serious wounds made on the young lady’s face. She called the police immediately to report the violence, however, the police dealt with the case in a sloppy way. The young lady posted the incident and the pictures of wounds on her social media page, which was reposted 503,000 times with 522,000 comments. The police once asked her to delete the post, but that just became another “Barbra Streisand House”. After the online traffic, near everyone in the nation put eyes on the incident, which urged the police and other administration to inquire.

That’s the groundswell. That’s the power the Internet gives to people. People unit online and connect with each other even don’t know each other. As it is mentioned in Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies, “people were using tools to link up with each other in various ways, and those trends were threatening to companies” (Li & Bernoff, 2011). The immeasurable strength of the netizen union forces the companies as well as authorities to listen to their voice and requirements. That is, let us say, the progress of democracy.