@DTC_AlexTDTran
Social media environments are able to mobilize people to seek social change because of a few different things. Deanna Zandt cites a type of communication that occurs when we “map” our relationships with people. She says that we are able to map our relationships in a pathway sense, that we can engage in immediate, and many-to-many conversations in our social media networks (Sharing for the Rest of Us). This allows us to communicate easier in order to spread the message. For example, take the Kony 2012 campaign. This campaign started as a video that became viral on the internet. This then got taken to various different social media networks in which people began to spread the message about this horrible leader and how they can help the Ugandans (http://invisiblechildren.com/kony/). Furthermore, take a image site such as imgur. This site allows one to post images of various different things to be viewed by it’s community. Similar to facebook, people can use this site in order to spark different movements. While these people on the internet are easily influenced, what Zandt says about mapping our relationships but also her idea of strong ties and weak ties (Page ). In this case, everyone that we talk to on the internet that we don’t know personally contributes to our weak ties. People that we meet under a common idea are weak ties but people we know in real life contribute to our strong ties. These ties bring people together in order to contribute to a campaign or some sort of call for social change.