Running through Berlin with You Tube on my mind
Filed under: Social Marketing on Monday, July 9th, 2007 by Nan DawkinsI was in Europe when “I’ve Got a Crush on Obama” started gaining steam on You Tube. The first stop on my trip was Berlin and as I ran past what is left of the old Checkpoint Charlie early one morning, I pondered whether the Wall would have been possible if You Tube had been around.
Both my husband and my older sister spent several years in Berlin during the height of the military build up (my sister’s friend was caught helping people escape to the West and spent six years in an East Berlin prison) so I’ve always been enthralled with student activism during that time — the tunnel built by students that resulted in so many escapes over a two day period; the cars transformed into escape vehicles; the countless acts of bravery. Even the small acts of rebellion — a friend we visited during our stay recounted her many trips into the East during the Wall era, smuggling necessities into friends, bringing information in and back out again. One lone individual, on foot, a conduit of information between East and West.
As I ran through the streets of East Berlin that morning, I wondered what student activism here would have looked like in the age of You Tube. The best escape routes based on troop movements and police presence, how to build better hiding places into cars, how people in the West were living differently, atrocities in the East. Not that the Soviets wouldn’t have tried to limit access to such information. Still, I can see our friend, in an apartment on the East side, pulling out an iPhone from underneath her big, bulky, 1970’s style Granny dress while a small crowd gathers round to watch the latest escape intelligence on You Tube. A free flow of information across that Wall – between the prisoners of the East and the activists of the West – would have been simply unmanageable for the Soviets.
Humans create; Humans share; Humans connect. We’ve always done it. The only thing that has changed over time is how we do it. Social Media just makes it a lot easier for us. It’s a simple concept but the implications are huge.
Marshall McLuhan (The Medium is the Message) said almost 40 years ago that “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” Which makes me wonder… what’s next? What will the next iteration of Social Media look like and how will it shape the world we live in?
