Opinion: How connective tech boosts political change

The 21st century is a terrible time to be a control freak. When I speak with leaders around the world and ask them what one thing has most changed for them over the last 15 years, they almost always cite the perceived loss of control. The thing they cite as the major reason? "Connection technologies" -- technologies like the internet and mobile phone networks that connect people to information and each other.

Media and information environments, political agendas, social movements, governmental decision-making processes and control over corporate brands have all been disrupted by citizens using what are now billions of devices and billions of internet connections. Information no longer flows exclusively from mainstream media and government out to society. It flows in a vast network of citizens and consumers interacting with once-dominant information sources. This network of people is constantly reading, writing, and evaluating everything, shaping the ideas that guide society and politics. In a ground-breaking speech on internet freedom given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January 2010, she described this by saying that the "spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet." A little bit of hindsight shows that this disruption has come to the foreign policy domain.

We can draw at least three early conclusions about the impact of these connection technologies on the development of political movements:

Conclusion #1: These technologies accelerate the growth of social and political movements.
Distance and time no longer limit access to real-time information. Movements that would have once taken years to develop and relied on strong ties between people well-known to each other now can be built in days or weeks, leveraging the relatively open platforms that social media provide. This phenomenon is plain to see in world events as diverse as the Arab Spring, political protests in Russia, disaster response in Japan, and the populist online movements supporting open internet policies in Europe and the United States.