Saudi Women Mobilizing to Lift Driving Ban

I'm listening to NPR in a cafe in Chelsea, Michigan and the story of Saudi Women using social media to mobilize a lift to the driving ban against women drivers is being discussed.

Yesterday I interviewed the incredible Natalie Zemon Davis (look her up) and we started talking about the different uses of social media, and it's challenging to place the mobilizations of protest and connecting societies in the same realm of entertainment and mundane social updates.

I guess it's similar to TV which always has more crap on it than anything of substance, but the difference here is in the fabric: TV is not a part of our lives the same way Facebook is. This boils down to one principle: location. In order to watch TV, and before the internet phone, most people had to be in a house, theater, or other location with electricity and cable. Facebook and other social medias are effortlessly portable. TV is also a static interaction whereas Facebook, and other social media, are dynamic and constant, obviously, it's called social media for its level of interactive capabilities.

Now, I am not about to preach censorship. I think it would be stupid for people to only be allowed to write, comment, etc., about certain things, but I am an advocate of personal responsibility and ownership, meaning that we should be held accountable to actions we take online. It's a federal offense for someone to open someone else's mail and it should be that same with email. As Sherry Turkle pointed out to me in an interview, "Democracy is based on privacy" (I'll leave the discussion on whether America is actually a democracy to a later date). This generation has different (if any) expectations of privacy than in generations past. It's common knowledge to know your emails are being looked at by third parties and that cookies may be placed in your browser. Businesses and advertisers should be banned from placing cookies in your web browser and sending ads based on key words in emails. This is an invasion of privacy, and also has another sociological effect: advertisers are only interested in key words, not the content of a whole, and not to say people are influenced by advertisers in ways of thinking (well, maybe), but I think generally people are becoming more like advertisers in the sense that a "tweet" or a "comment" is usually an immediate reaction to a stimulus. Reactions are usually triggered by key words that the person may or may not agree with, and not the content as a whole.

Of course this does not apply to every person, tweet, or comment, and this is a theory I have not tested or proven. Only my mere opinion and culmination of thought

Congrats to the women of Saudi Arabia! It's not easy to do what they're doing when men and women are against them (1,000 women signed a protest asking King Abdullah NOT to lift the ban), but they also have a lot of supporters and social media is an intricate part to the ban lift mobilization effort.

Personally, as an american, feminist, and traveler  it's incredibly difficult for me to imagine not being able to drive. Not only the action of driving, but being denied personal responsibility, privilege, and choice; as well as the forced dependency on a man and the resulting inferiority of being a woman. Shit. Where would I be?

Ironically, I filmed a short segment of myself driving while I was thinking about what Natalie had to say in the interview. I will be uploading this later today on my vimeo: vimeo.com/kelleybrannon

Hopefully very soon a woman from Saudi Arabia can share a similar experience of the open road, clarity of thought, and freedom of self.