Rebecca MacKinnon Quotes

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.

It's extraordinary that revolutions taking place around the world were sparked by communication on the Internet.

Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.

The Arab spring that began in 2010 was driven by the educated youth who were connected to the outside world. They had visions of liberal politics derived from social networks. They used innovative means to spread awareness and to network among activists.

Internet companies created the social-media tools that fueled the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street insurgencies, and that have helped political candidates rally grass-roots support.

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.

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

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

Having disrupted business practices, social interactions and political campaigns, 2011 will be seen as the year that the rise of the Internet first disrupted foreign relations.

It no longer counts as remarkable that Egyptians organized their uprising on social media.

I sincerely believe blogging can save America.

Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.

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

In the 21st century, you have to use technology as one of the tools in the toolkit to bring about social change.

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes.

The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.

Now an audience of more than 1 billion people is only a click away from every voice online, and remarkable stories and content can gain flash audiences as people share via social networks, blogs and e-mail. This radically equalizes the power relationship between, say, a blogger and a multibillion dollar corporation.

When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.

Digital activism did not spring immaculately out of Twitter and Facebook. It's been going on ever since blogs existed.

Society has changed so dramatically that it's empowered the individual, and technology has a lot to do with that. Years ago, if you had a bad experience at a restaurant, you could complain to the manager. Maybe you could picket. Now, you go online and write a review that may go viral.

This is a very different world. Much of it is new. What has happened is that information technology has politicized the world…It’s a world where most of the big problems spill over national boundaries.

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

People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences.

I've always believed in speaking my mind, and I think the technology has made it more prominent. Even a common man's voice is heard prominently now, much to the chagrin and surprise of politicians. They aren't used to that.

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