Social Movements in the Digital Age

In December 1955, after Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, a woman named Jo Ann Robinson stayed up all night at Alabama State College. She and two students ran off 52,500 mimeographed flyers on the college's machines, one for every Black household in the city. By dawn, the leaflets were being distributed by hand, car, and bicycle. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began three days later.

In December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside a government building in the town of Sidi Bouzid. A bystander recorded the aftermath on a phone. The video reached Facebook within hours, then Al Jazeera, then the world. Within four weeks, the Tunisian president had fled the country. Within two months, protests were sweeping Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen.

The distance between those two moments is not just technological. It is a transformation in the speed, scale, and structure of collective action itself. Robinson's mimeographed flyers could reach a city. Bouazizi's video reached a continent. But what each achieved, and what each failed to achieve, tells us something important about the relationship between communication tools and political change.