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News Tip: Are a Moscow or Beijing 'Spring' Possible?

Business Professor Tony O'Driscoll Discusses the Possibility of Social Media-fueled Uprisings in Russia and China

Tony O'DriscollProfessor, Fuqua School of Business, Duke UniversityBio:http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty_research/faculty_directory/odriscoll/Twitter handle: @wadatripp

The executive director of Fuqua's Center for Technology, Entertainment and Media, O'Driscoll's research lies at the intersection of business, innovation, technology and learning.

Quote:

"Social technologies are unique in their ability to create transparency and orchestrate collective activity on the part of citizenry in real time. In the recent cases of Russian voting irregularities and the high-speed train crash cover-up attempt in China, the citizenry leveraged social media to immediately expose irregular activity on the part of authority.

"New forms of technology are placing the power in the citizenry. While we have seen that aggregation of discontent around irregularities can very rapidly topple regimes, the question as to whether or not the Russian or Chinese governments could suffer a similar fate is not easy to predict. It is up to each citizenry or group to leverage this newfound power base beyond simply exposing irregularities. Let's remember -- technology is not a strategy. Technology can help expose injustice and amplify discontent, but at the end of the day the will of the people behind the technology to drive change must be unyielding if a regime change is to occur."