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‘Global Civil Society’ and the Internet 2012: Time to Update Our Perspective

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Global Civil Society 2012

Part of the book series: Global Civil Society Yearbook ((GCSY))

Abstract

To date, there are around 2 billion people using the internet (see Chapter 5 this volume, Figure 5.1). The 750 million active users of the social network site Facebook share more than 30 billion pieces of content each month (Facebook Statistics 2011). Each minute more than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube (YouTube Blog 2011) and 3,000 new pictures are shared on Flickr, which in September 2010 had a stock of 5 billion images (Flickr Blog 2010). Each day around 200 million 140-character-messages are sent via Twitter; this is the equivalent of a 10-million-page book per day, or 8,163 copies of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Twitter Blog 2011). Social media services, such as Twitter, have not only become an integral part of people’s daily lives, but these days also guide military strategies, such as the NATO strikes in Libya (Norton-Taylor and Hopkins 2011), and play a considerable role in contemporary mass activism (see Chapter 3 this volume).

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Authors
  1. Henrietta L. Moore
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  2. Sabine Selchow
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

    Mary Kaldor (Professor of Global Governance and director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development) (Professor of Global Governance and director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development)

  2. University of Cambridge, UK

    Henrietta L. Moore (William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology) (William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology)

  3. Department of International Development, London School of Economics (LSE), UK

    Sabine Selchow (Researcher in the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development) (Researcher in the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development)

  4. Methodology Institute at LSE, UK

    Sabine Selchow (Researcher in the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development) (Researcher in the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development)

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© 2012 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Moore, H.L., Selchow, S. (2012). ‘Global Civil Society’ and the Internet 2012: Time to Update Our Perspective. In: Kaldor, M., Moore, H.L., Selchow, S., Murray-Leach, T. (eds) Global Civil Society 2012. Global Civil Society Yearbook. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230369436_2

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