Barton Gellman Quotes

The Arab Spring is kind of a perfect model for how people are going to use technology to act collectively in their own interest in the future. There's never been a revolution that was coordinated by social media to the degree that the Arab Spring was.

Politically, we have seen the impact of social media organizing people through the Arab Spring.

A hashtag is not a movement.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

What it takes to get people from liking and sharing and retweeting to organising is a hard and long process. Technology has really changed the game in terms of how people participate and what they decide to participate in.

Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection.

All the big revolutions, whether it's the Industrial Revolution, the Arab Spring, those changes happened by economic and social shifts brought about by the people's voices, and those things weren't voted for. Most of our changes today are brought about through technology, not by voting.

If there had been Twitter at the time of the French Revolution, they would have claimed that the French Revolution was caused by twitter.

Social media now make it easier to organize protest movements, even - or perhaps especially - in authoritarian regimes.

21st-century activism is different perhaps in the sense that the individual can be more present in the process, especially via social media, but the underlying drivers remain the same as desire to change the status quo.

Stop using your phones and laptops as toys and use them to start a revolution.

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising.

While the revolution will be certainly televised, it strikes me that there is a strong possibility that the revolution will also be crowd-funded.

I have made speeches urging women to adopt methods of rebellion such as have been adopted by men in every revolution.

Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station.

We talking about revolution because that's the era that you're caught in.

The Occupy Wall Street project feels like a burning ember that might light the torch of justice and inflame our longing for freedom.

All the great political music was made at the height of political confrontations.

Whenever a technology enables people to organize at a pace that wasn't before possible, new kinds of politics emerge.

If a person with a bullet in Dallas can change the world, imagine a person with an idea could do.

The Egyptian Revolution makes it clear, if anybody was in doubt, that digital technologies are going to play a powerful role in the future of global politics.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.