Networked Communications and Freedom of Speech

Mass Media

In Nimona, networked communications play a very similar, if not identical, role to those in the real world. Within the first two minutes of the film, we see a digital broadcast being used for live news. This same broadcast is used for government-sponsored advertisements about military recruiting-- something which our own government and many others in the world uses to large success in boosting sign-up numbers [1]. The movie doesn't get into many details around the impacts of the government's broadcasts, we do see more general results from the other main form of networked communications used for mass media in Nimona, that being social media. Around the 58 minute mark, a YouTube stand-in website is used by the protagonists to distribute footage of the main antagonist confessing to her crimes. This acts as a catalyst which is able to spark greater social change, but fails to itself be enough to cause this without other external factors, another parallel to real-world social media activism movements. As put it, "Social media activism and street activism complete each other," meaning these digital forms of communication only make a real-world impact when people take real-world action [2], both in the movie and in real life.

Page Citations

1. James N. Dertouzos and Steven Garber, (April 13, 2013), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00913367.2006.10639233, April 21, 2024

2. Sezen Ravanoğlu Yılmaz, (July 13, 2017), https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/ijsi/issue/30400/328298, April 21, 2024