Social Media Moving East

(MoneyWatch)  (Note: This is a post submitted by BNET member Michael Mattis. To submit your own post, click here.)
What a difference three years and the global spread of social media technology make.

Back in 2005, Prospect, a British center-left magazine of ideas and culture, polled its readers to find out who were the most celebrated public intellectuals. Not surprisingly, the American linguist and professional contrarian, Noam Chomsky (author of "Manufacturing Consent" and other anti-establishment writings) came out number one. The bulk of the rest of the top ten was predictably made up of other Westerners, like Umberto Echo, Richard Dawkins and Václav Havel.

Earlier this year, Prospect ran the same poll and published the results in its July edition. Chomsky came in 11th place, Umberto Echo in 14th, Richard Dawkins in 19th and Václav Havel in 26th. So who made this year's top five? Fethullah Gülen, Muhammad Yunus, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, Orhan Pamuk, Aitzaz Ahsan-- In fact, everyone in the top ten came from a Middle Eastern background, and most were religious scholars.

So what happened? The editors at Prospect at first suspected foul play, believing that their site had been hacked. Upon further investigation, however, Prospect found that its little poll, which in the past had pretty much been restricted by technology to a predominantly Western audience, had gone global in a big way. They found that their poll was getting pick-up from Turkish newspapers ?€" such as Zaman, with its 700,000 circulation ?€" as well as other news outlets, blogs and social media sites throughout the Middle East. Eventually, more than half a million votes were registered in the polling.

This Middle Eastern ripple effect was begun by the followers of this year's first-place winner, Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic modernist scholar and the author of some sixty books. The Fethullahçi, as Gülen's followers are called, waged an effective Web, email and social media campaign (Facebook's Turkish users now number more than 3 million, according to Prospect) to put their man on top. This in turn raised awareness of Prospect's poll, which snowballed across the region and that part of the Web devoted to it.

The take-away here? Social media is taking hold in the developing world at advanced clip ?€" perhaps more advanced than many realize. Participation in the global online conversation ?€" and in global online commerce ?€" among the people from these parts of the world will increase dramatically in the foreseeable future.