Slashdot Mirror
Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted
An anonymous reader writes "Social media is ill-suited to promoting real social change, argues Malcolm Gladwell in this article from The New Yorker magazine. He deftly debunks conventional wisdom surrounding the impact of Twitter, Facebook and other social media in driving systemic social change, comparing them to the organizational strategies of the 1960s civil rights movement. For example, the Montgomery bus boycott, he argues, was successful because it was driven by the disciplined and hierarchically organized NAACP. In contrast, a loose, social-media style network wouldn't have sustained the year long campaign. He concludes that social media promote social 'weak ties' which are not strong enough to motivate people to take big risks, such as imprisonment or attack, for social change."
I can haz revolution?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Have these jackasses forgotten the wto and other protests recently?
One obvious example of how powerful the internet can be.
On the more subtle side, social media does influence the electorate, therefore affecting votes and possibly politicians. So even if it may not bring about drastic, almost revolutionary change, it will certainly influence politics.
Developers: We can use your help.
Article posts 'October 4 2010' as the publication date... Unless I pulled a Rip Van Winkle at my desk just now, we're looking at news FROM THE FUTURE!!! :)
The 4Chan guys were remarkably effective.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I would have been very interested to read the author's take on Anonymous v. Scientology. Anonymous seem to have taken the weak-tie social links and emphasized the strongest points of it, viz crowd-sourcing and anonymized protests to help prevent the individual protestors from being tracked/sued by the Scientology lawyer corp.
Social media is a young technology, we have no way of knowing the effects it may or may not have on enacting a real change on society in the coming years.
I had no idea The New Yorker was still in print.
Going strong since 2008, and is precisely a "loose, social-media style network".
I know a lot of iranian protestors who seemed convinced otherwise.
"He concludes that social media promote social 'weak ties' which are not strong enough to motivate people to take big risks, such as imprisonment or attack, for social change."
Call me a cynic (-: cheap flattery works :-), but I can't imagine anything that would motivate me for that much of social change. Mostly because most other societal systems are more or less as good/bad (inside a factor of two) as the where I live.
And if I did get motivated to change society, I would support (or maybe even join!) a political party and try to get into the parliament. Since that is allowed where I live.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Just as soon as there is something similar in other countries...
expect governments to impose censorship measures against websites that host these types of services.
"Lame" - Galaxar
sic 'em /b !!
Just social media doesn't promote anything. It is a tool. I will bet the NAACP used the phone when promoting the boycott. It may take an organizational structure to promote social change. But, that organization can use social media as a tool to communicate with and motivate its base.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
The primary benefit of these sites is not in organizing (as in administration) such movements, but in organizing (as is bringing together) large numbers of like-minded individuals. Of course a rudderless anarchistic model would not last year long campaigns; any "organization" that is left as a disorganized amorphous blob will collapse as soon as the initial catalystic spark dies off. On the other hand, if those same Montgomery bus boycotters had a Facebook presence available to them, the movement could have gone national or beyond. These modern tools are just that: Tools. A serious movement would still need serious leadership.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Just as soon as there is something similar in other countries, expect a LOT of people to get on twitter to organise dissent.
Not necessarily. Once a country gains the capacity not merely to block Twitter/Facebook/Whatever (that's too simple) but to trace the messages back to their sources - not necessarily on the day or in real time - then it's game over. If you know that the goons will come knocking at three in the morning, you'll be loathe to use the likes of TwitBook.
What's needed is a truly secure solution - because we know that the bad guys are likely to find needles in the haystack...
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
likes this post.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Obviously this guy has never met the fury that is 4chan...
(read that again, FURY, not furry.)
You apparently didn't read this correctly. Slashdot is referencing/paraphrasing a Malcolm Galdwell article—which is then linked to for you to read the whole argument. Maybe you should comment on the new yorker story, not just the summary here. Also, the free spreading of dissent isn't really the same as actually creating revolutionary change. While it could lead to such, it is still just someone talking (or typing), not necessarily acting.
If you actually made it to the bottom of page #1 of the Gladwell article, you might have read this(emphasis mine):
If you'd read it, you'd see that the author doubts Twitter was actually that vital to the effort. As a supporting question, he wonders why they weren't speaking in Farsi.
That when the revolution does come, Mark Zuckerburg is the first against the wall.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Say what you want about today's social problems, but today you don't have a society that thinks its ok to make people give up their seats because of the color of their skin. Changing was inevitable regardless of what technology was used.
Whale
While ad-hoc organization may not work, comparing it to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 50's, if they had Twitter, Facebook etc. the NAACP could've gotten their message out faster and in a more efficient way.
I mean, it did work well for the Obama Campaign.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
He concludes social media promotes 'weak ties'
but could not the existence of such social mediums create the potential to refuse utilization of such 'weak ties' by individuals, strengthening the ties they create through other social constructs?
Activism from the left is dead in the US. There's no significant, effective opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the concentration of wealth, the crushing of unions, the decline in wages, or the tax benefits enjoyed by Wall Street. (All of which would have been unacceptable to the Eisenhower administration, an indication of how far to the Right the US has moved.)
The activist organizations that accomplish anything are either on the Right, funded by big business, or church-based. Or they're purely self-interested, like gun owners and gays.
Much of '60s activism was powered by music. That's over. Today's musicians have near zero political effect.
The same argument could have been made against the civil rights movement in the 60s. The author would have argued that as the NCAAP was using the telephone to organize rather than meeting always face to face drinking pints at the local as the Sons of Liberty did, that Dr. King was doomed to fail because his network relied on telephone calls and so was too loose.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
take it with a grain of salt. he gets paid to say up is down, black is white.
Because you need BODIES on the ground to hold your position, MORONS!!!!
Yours In Moscow,
K. Trout
If a group like the NAACP had tried the same stunts in a more dictatorial country, say Iran or Cuba, how long would they have lasted? How long would an actual organization survive with their leaders constantly arrested, tried and executed with in a week of founding the organization?
Twitter, Facebook and the like have the advantage of anonymity when organizing and implementing plans.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
Here's the relevant bit of the article:
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
So to summarize, the actual protests in Iran were being organized locally, whereas Twitter was simply used by Western media to cover the event because, well, Westerners don't live in Iran. I know it's not typical MOD for 'dotters to RTFA, but in this case, the article was well written and very thorough. I would highly suggest taking the time to read through the entire thing.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
the protests against the passing of proposition 8 in California were huge, sustained, and largely organized by social networking.
Right.
Ask the people ACS:Law about the power of weak social media.
Anonymous poked their buttons, were dismissed as "trivial", then they stepped it up and exposed weaknesses in ACS:Law that is still having repercussions for the organization.
Twitters exposing election fraud in more than a few countries hasn't made the news either.
I think people are either foolishly underestimating the power of people who can communicate or purposely trying to trivialize in the vain hope of preventing people from using their "mob power".
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. "It is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right," Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran." The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. "Western journalists who couldn't reach--or didn't bother reaching?--people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."
Networks don't drive social change; people do. This is akin to saying "guns don't kill--people do," a position that some find objectionable. But in both cases, it can make a difference what instruments are available. Social change, protest movements, and other forms of rebellion may be facilitated by one's network, whether it's the telephone network or Twitter; similarly (though this analogy is getting strained), a murderous rage can be facilitated by a handgun in the desk drawer. Though I haven't read it yet, Malcolm Gladwell's article demands to be read--all of his articles do, in my experience--because he's probably saying something different, or at least more subtle, than that social media don't promote or drive change: that seems too obvious for him.
John Branch
I just can't write about it at the moment as i'm being attacked by the sequoias, of all things...
but no 'strong ties' appear out of nowhere. Social media do contribute to begin the ties. But to think they're the only ties we need is plain dumb.
It's Malcolm Gladwell. Like most of his works, you can tell that he did his research. And he addresses why your point isn't how the world actually works. Your idea seems like common sense, but he shows that it turns out it that it just isn't true. Basically it turns out that revolutions/demonstrations work better when you ask a few people who you know well than thousands of people you barely know.
Check out the author's two twitter accounts:
http://twitter.com/Malcgladwell
http://twitter.com/gladwell
Combined # of tweets: 32
Combined # of people he follows: 12, nearly all of whom are twitter accounts for old media establishments.
This is typical thread I see among all those who condemn social media: Unfamiliarity breeds contempt.
To blog is sublime
Go read a book and you'll find that the NAACP wasn't responsible for the Montgomery protest. The MIA was. The NAACP 100% disagreed with direct action at that time. It was only later when they funding suffered huge losses that they came around to understand the importance of direct protest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Improvement_Association
The article writer might want to talk to, oh, maybe those Iranians, or maybe any and all of the flash mobs that have taken place. Out of touch anyone?
This was a very good article and I would recommend reading the whole thing to anyone interested in the topic. It was well thought out and I want to give props to the author first and foremost.
Now, that said, I think something that is missing from the article is a discussion of the 'action' factor that is used in protests and social movements today. Something I've noticed with a lot of online social movements is that they are very good at giving every member a means to voice their thoughts on a particular issue. This has granted a lot of people a large audience for their thoughts regarding any particular matter. As such, anyone can get up on their digital soap box (as I am doing now) and spout their claims to get a series of 'likes' or 'dislikes' from their large online audience. This has a very nice effect on the speaker, making them feel like they are taking part in something important and big. However, the reason many of these online causes do not effect as much change as someone might initially think is because that seems to be where all of the action stops. Social media has given folks a means to express their opinion without backing anything up with action (I do draw an arbitrary line here that distinguishes talk from action).
The author of this article makes a fine summary of the American Civil Rights movement back in the 60's. Something that he fails to address when summarizing these movements, however, is that they had long lasting consequences on society as a whole. The bus boycott actually damaged the economic stance of the bus company being boycotted. The Southern sit-ins prevented the businesses where they took place from earning much cash off of white customers. The action taken by those who participated in the Civil Rights movement went beyond mere words. They actually cost their opponents something valuable. This is something that online social media movements do not do. The folks pillaging Darfur and its inhabitants don't give a damn about the 1.2 million Facebook users that want to help Darfur. Those Facebook users aren't damaging their opponents in any way. They are passively sitting around, voicing their dissent through words or micro-donations, and patting themselves on the back for a job well done. Meanwhile, those that are committing atrocities in Darfur are being allowed to work, as normal, without any outside interference. Thus, nothing will change. There is no perturbation to the status quo.
The reason the Iranian case was somewhat different is because there really were protesters in Tehran marching and having rallies. That's great. However, those rallies did not cost the Iranian politicians anything of value. Standing around and complaining, even in large numbers, did not prevent the vote-smearing that was going on. Thus, nothing changed. the Iranian protesters came closer to afflicting change that the Darfur FB users because they actually organized and tried to do something. However, they did not damage anything of value to those in favor of the status quo.
So I would say that if anyone really wants a revolution over a particular issue, not only is hierarchical organization important (as discussed in the fine article), but also, those organizing the protest (be it through social media or any other medium) must, necessarily, find a way to deprive their opponents of something valuable over a long span of time. That said, for issues close to us 'dotters, I would say that simply commenting on related stories is not enough. If we really want the MAFIAA to fall for good, we need to deprive them of something they value. If we want politicians to stop acting like corrupt douchebags, we need to go beyond writing letters to them and complaining. We need to organize and cost them something of value. If we want net neutrality to be implemented, we need to find a way to deprive all throttling ISPs from getting something of value (customers, money, new technology, something).
At least, that's my two cents.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
In fact, I tried to find some quote, but couldn't find a good one. I did however find this one, which explains his modus operandi so much better than I could:
My goal in life is to get to the place that I can take the same idea and just repackage it over and over again, like Bruce Willis did with "Die Hard," or Bill O'Reilly does with the whole thing about being rich, white, male and entitled -- and be really pissed off about how he's treated by the world.
His hero is Bill O'Reilly. Great, just what we need in the world, more Bill O'Reillys.
Qxe4
Whatever else you may think about the Tea Party, their initial protests were organized through the blogosphere (and mostly still are), and it would be foolish to deny that they've had some effect politics. Because of this, they lack a centralized leadership structure, and it will be curious to see if they can survive their own success.
Not a typewriter
And the example of how it affects the electorate shows again that tweeting is a tool used by politicians to both read and influence the people.
The article makes twitter up as the cause or driving force of change. That's never the truth. Radio, TV, the internet, and all the tools on the internet are just that, tools. Statements like "The revolution will be Televised/Tweeted/Facebooked/beamed directly into our brains" is true, because whenever the revolution comes it will be broadcast on as many mediums as possible.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Effectively the article is saying that even if you use /b as your personal army, it doesn't matter, because you just promoted yourself a personal army of useless retards. =)
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Social media led revolution works swimingly...
http://i.imgur.com/abXW9.png
~Syberz
Today he can't appear in public in the UK (the security would be too expensive) and his protégé David Miliband has just narrowly lost the chance of being the next Prime Minister, with many people thinking that his support for the war tipped the balance. Protests change public opinion, perhaps only a little, but sometimes decisively. You appear to be falling into the trap of so many USA citizens, of despising "soft power". But the values of your Founding Fathers are today being more undermined by the "soft power" of lobbyists and journalists than by any display of force.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Which is more important, that you had 16 well-organized protests which impacted very few people directly, or the impact of television on the entire country?
http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=civilrights
Clearly, the impact of television on the Civil Rights movement was much greater. And, TV is a much weaker connection than Facebook.
Its fun to think that instant messaging will solve social ills, but 140 characters per message means nothing if you are going to run away when the rifles get aimed. Revolutions only work when you have the will to stand up and fight, and possibly die in the cause. Flower power dissent is about as effective as a wet noodle, it takes will, steel and muscle.
It seems to me that the quality of the social link of facebook and twitter are dependent on the quality of the social unit involved in the link. If the social unit is strong, effective and determined then the use of these tools will necessarily augment their effect. If the social unit is weak and transitory then the effect of the tools will be weak and transitory.
Today is an ephemeron, doomed to the crypt of yesterday.
Did you read the article at all? The author goes into great length about the Iranian Twitter protests and just why they didn't matter. Specifically, the author seems to think that the massive amount of Tehran protesting was actually being done by Westerners outside of the country while the Iranians themselves were not organizing with Twitter as much as was hyped:
Here's the relevant bit of the article:
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
So to summarize, the actual protests in Iran were being organized locally, whereas Twitter was simply used by Western media to cover the event because, well, Westerners don't live in Iran. I know it's not typical MOD for 'dotters to RTFA, but in this case, the article was well written and very thorough. I would highly suggest taking the time to read through the entire thing.
Its not like the locally organized Iranian protests were successful.
Twitter may be less usefull than an actual protest, but as soon as there are cameras on every corner tied to a facial recognition database then the old-school protest will be just as useless.
Revolution/mass movement/polictical action and social media aren't particularly related. Social media is a tool, not a goal, and not a method. There's nothing inherent to Twitter that prevents it from being used by well organized groups as another (and easier to use) tool to get the word out.
The internet has the effect of lowering the bar to entry in to a lot of things. It is cheaper and easier to start up a company with a world wide market, it is cheaper and easier to rant incoherently on your pet peeve to lots of people, and it's easier to communicate political ideas to people who share them.
That means that more people will do all those things. One can self-publish a book through Amazon without a real publisher. One can get one's fifteen minutes (or even more) with a free blog. And one can start a political movement. And most of the people doing all those things because the internet makes it so easy will do it poorly. That is the nature of lowering the bar.
However, none of that will interfere with the efforts of those who know what they're doing in the first place. Those who would have succeeded in the pre-internet age will succeed now, not because the new tools exist, but because they're smart enough to figure out how to use them. And those who were too incompetent and clueless in the pre-internet world to get in to the game at all will fail now, not because the new tools are flawed, but because they don't know what to do with them.
Having a paint brush doesn't make you Michaelangelo, even if it's a computer controlled pneumatic hammer, and having a ball point pen, or even a word processor and printer, doesn't make you Shakespeare. But if you are Michaelangelo or Shakespeare, having that pneumatic hammer or word processer won't make you any less a genius.
You missed the sarcasm, and Internet != Twitter
Play Command HQ online
Online discussion of issues is important, but real life follow through is essential.
Well, there's reason to doubt the effectiveness of Twitter in the Iranian case. I don't happen to buy the author's argument (that many of the tweets were originating outside of Iran) as either here nor there. That does not mean the information necessarily originated outside of Iran, or even if it did whether it really mattered.
The real bottom line is that the government forces won; it retained power, albeit at a loss of international respect. That might change the course of history in the long run, but it hasn't yet.
That said, the author's argument amounts to this: (a) the kind of social media mediated revolution scenarios some have hypothesized haven't happened yet and (b) historical revolutions have not worked the way those scenarios are envisioned to work. Even if we accept both these statements, it tells us *nothing* about the feasibility of these scenarios, at least yet. The whole hypothesis is that social media create a new avenue for social change, and that really can't be disproven by counterexamples from before the technology existed.
In a nutshell, there's no compelling evidence for either side of this argument. In fact, I suspect there never will be.
I think it almost certain that there will be revolutions in the future (or counter-revolutions) in which social media play a seemingly dramatic part. It will certainly *look* like the technology played a decisive role in these events. But won't never know for sure what would have happened absent the technology. Perhaps somebody lives who would have died because he gets the tweet about a paramilitary roadblock. Another man dies because the tweet is traced back to his phone. These are the kinds of events that can change history, but that kind of thing has always happened. An opposition leader chooses a flight that happens to crash and the public blames the government. Does this mean aviation is responsible for the revolutionary outburst that follows?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If 4Chan isn't a "weak social tie" then I'm not super clear what is and Anonymous has been pretty active. Do they not count somehow?
Yeah, last I checked, twitter still lacks the ability to project bullets.
At least in America, there will be no bloodless revolution, and anything that pretends to be such is clearly a sham.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
So you're saying only and organization like Fox News with a figurehead like Glenn Beck could lead to really real social change? I for one DON'T welcome our new overzealous extremist overlords.
or else!
I agree that social media like facebook, twitter, and even blogs promotes weak social ties.
Anybody remember BBSs? Back before the Internet got big?
Most of the boards back in the day had close-nit groups. The kinds of people who met on the board, then got to know each other well enough to trust each other and possibly meet in real life.
Fast forward to today, and the old style message boards have been replaced by a "wall" and "pokes." There are tons of content, but it's all shallow and breezy. Maybe modern social media just sucks.
Really, how is this news? While you might take advantage of Facebook as a helpful tool to organize protests, you still need to get out on street.
No government is going to change its policies just because there's a popular group on Facebook against it.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
Facebook and twitter and the internet are ways to send information over landlines and airwaves. To hype them into something "revolutionary," is to make the same mistake that caused the first internet bubble.
They are powerful communication tools though, because they facilitate encryption and transfer of huge amounts of data.
The civil rights movement is a bad analogy. The NAACP and the SCLC never assumed power or tried to assume power. Their primary objective was to shame the rest of American society into becoming a free and democratic society. With good communication tools, I think that could have been accomplished with a much looser coalition equipped with modern communication technology.
You do need a disciplined movement to take over power, though, and facebook and twitter will result in a lot of schism and faction.
I can say first hand that Tweeting will not be part of the revolution and here is why.
During the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, MN there were a handful of helpful accounts setup for people to follow during the protest letting you know to not go this way or to not go that way as there were cops in riot gear on such and such street. They caught on to the tweets really quick which wasn't too much of a surprise and before you knew it you wouldn't receive any tweets from those accounts. You would think freedom of speech was protected if you simply read through American History but that is now far from the truth.
To the guy up there that said protests do nothing. Well. These days I would agree although I still think they have plenty of value. Why aren't they very effective these days? Simple, large corporations and the ties they have to the government. If the government says they don't want any more than a blip on the screen about something then that's all you will see on the TV and luckily for the cops it's usually the shot of that one lost young soul who thinks he understands the definition of Anarchy only in his mind it means to smash everything. If people don't know what is going on then in their minds it didn't happen. Ignorance is truly bliss here in the 2000's. Most people think they are "supposed to" wake up, go to work, go home, eat dinner, fall asleep and do it over again. Then when the weekend rolls around they will watch TV and buy stuff they don't need to fulfill the part of their brain that tells them they are unhappy going through life like a robot programmed by so called social standards.
TeaParty
Q.E.D
I'm not commenting on the validity of the TeaParty movement at all, I'm just saying that it seems to be counter to what the author just said. It is shunned by the MSM and derogatorily referred to as "teabaggers" by many. Yet in spite of the vitriol against it, has sustained for well over a year. And even if you don't like it, you need to admit it is a juggernaut that is completely changing the political landscape. Even (R) people are running scared.
On a side note, thank you California voters for choosing two complete dumb turds for Governor and two more twits for Senate. I'm sure glad I vote third party.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The amazing thing is that only one statement in your post is remotely accurate.
If it's the same group of unemployed twits
Most attendees at protests in the developed world are either employed or students. Unemployed people generally are too busy scraping pennies and trying to find work to go protest anything.
Protesters these days are mostly on the wrong side of history and only effect fantasy land (where they reside).
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - protesters were generally against them, both have turned into quagmires, and neither have achieved their stated aims (Iraq, because the WMDs we were after didn't exist, Afghanistan, because Osama bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora). Explain how the protesters were on the wrong side of that one.
You can find .25% of the population to protest just about anything (e.g. WTO etc).
0.25% of the population is approximately 15 million people worldwide, or 750,000 people in the United States. If it's that easy, prove it by organizing 750,000 people to protest stupid protests.
The fact that .25% is still a large number of people should not give their opinions any more weight.
Who's opinions should we give weight to? People who bother to get out and protest, people who answer public opinion polls, rich people, politically connected people, or some other group of people? No matter how you slice it, you're going to get a subset of the population.
Making real change is hard work that starts by understanding reality.
The one true statement in your entire post.
Most protesters just want to break things and/or find a nice slutty protester girl.
I'll make an assumption here: at least 5% of protesters who break things are caught by the police. In a typical major protest, there are about 100,000 protesters and about 300 arrests. That means that at most 6% of the protesters could even remotely be considered to be interested in breaking things.
As far as finding a nice slutty protester girl, if you've actually been to a protest you'll figure out pretty rapidly that a large number of protesters are married, often with children, a lot of them are elderly, and that the public image of a bunch of rowdy college kids hasn't been true since at least 1975 or so.
I am officially gone from
Because if any of those movement today were really endangering the governement, as opposed to be buzzing annoying fly, they would simply use their power to disable some choice router or satellite transmission, or tower. No transmission, no tweet, no broadcast.
Malcolm Gladwell is wrong. The 4000 civilian protesters who gathered outside of the Police Hospital in Quito where President Correa was being held hostage by rioting Police were at least partially organized through twitter. When your national media all shut down or provide no information, twitter, as it did in Iran, and Honduras, became one of the few viable sources of outside information and coordination. Twitter and SMS messages are what brought those 4000 protesters into confrontation with the rioting police. They most certainly did put their lives on the line, and one of them was killed by the police, and at least 37 injured.
I think the problem is that by tweeting about something people think they've done their job. It's the equivalent of sticking all those ribbons on cars.
"I've devoted 30 seconds between fun and games to think about something important."
But honestly, I think it's more of a symptom of larger problems. Despite everything people piss and moan about Americans, and the developed world in general, by and large have it pretty good. There's a constant stream of entertainment and shiny toys. This stuff is the adult equivalent of a pacifier. And a lot of what seems to get people upset is the fact that they can't have more of it, or more time to enjoy it. I'm convinced we're living in an era where people don't want to be responsible for anything. They'll happily go to the government for all their needs, be it giving up rights for security or expecting handouts of every kind. So why expend any effort on actually doing something for yourself?
I also suspect that politics have gotten so polarized and fear-mongering so rampant because that's the only way people will pay any attention at all.
You claim that neither the war in Afghanistan nor in Iraq acheived their stated aims. I would argue that both acheived their stated aims (although there is a good chance that that will yet be reversed in Afghanistan). In Iraq, the stated aim was the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Now, I may be mistaken but I am pretty sure that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power there. In Afghanistan, the stated aim was the removal of the Taliban from power and destroying the Al Qaeda training camps that were operating openly there, The Taliban are not in power in Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan have been destroyed. Now there is reason to believe that when we remove our troops from Afghanistan the Taliban will be able to regain power, so that war may yet prove to be a failure.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
VIVA LA RESISTANCE!!! THE REVOLUTION WILL COMETH BY WAY OF TWITTER! Nah sayers heed thy warning that the collective power of twitter is a fo
Gee, I wish I had an academic reason to dislike twitter. Oh look, wish granted!
It's almost like the tools for social change have been co-opted.
Heh.
-Styopa
Which is called Freenet, of course. The problem, of course, is that a government can just effectively outlaw useful encryption on the internet like the FBI is aruging we should do right now, and like Obama seems to be friendly towards. We're really doing our best to be a shining beacon of oppression when it comes to new media, sadly enough.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It strikes me that there are similarities between the concept of social media effecting change, and the concept of far-flung developers creating successful free software. Both rely on a loosely-knit network of interested individuals who often have never met each other in person, using technology collaboratively to foster commitment, create an organization, develop an agenda, and manage a sustained effort, at personal cost, toward a common goal. Given the success of the FOSS model, why WOULDN'T social media be a good means of fomenting social change? TFA says, "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice". I'm not so sure that this is true; only time will tell.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Simple. Because the revolutionaries obviously have better things to do.
You, and TFA, are grossly underestimating the scale of Internet-based social networking on creating & facilitating the Tea Party movement. Fox barely scratches the surface, and is way behind the curve.
The Internet is much, much bigger than you realize.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Was it me or did the author of this article seem really bitter for some reason? I don't understand why tho. I understand his point that social media probably wouldn't be enough to cause people to go into danger. I don't think he understands that social media will allow any organizer to find more people that are willing to do so. He seems to think that just because at one point your link to someone may be weak, that it will always be so. However the meeting of people happens, people tend to form friendships more often with people that feel similarly. It is just a medium. In terms of the article, social media becomes the church in the sense that it is the place where an organizer can communicate with the people he/she is organizing. Also, he neglects that a church congregation is comprised of people linked both strongly and weakly.
This is no longer the 60s, you can't just go to one physical place and find 98%+ of the people you are looking for.
To the contrary, nothing like it. There is no top-down organization. Anyone claiming or imputed to be a leader thereof assuredly isn't. Insofar as big names, leadership, and funding occurs, that is only because there is such a groundswell of resentment toward the federal government that some will inevitably make use thereof.
I've been following, and part of, the movement for well before any alleged organization started. The "Tax Day Tea Party" was in fact a viral meme, a very popular idea that many were looking for. Many people suggested marching on Washington DC 4/15/09 - not because of some top-down organization, but because like-minded people could contact each other and say "hey, wouldn't it be great to march on Washington DC 4/15/09" - "yeah, I'm there if you are". Deep pockets participated because it was obvious participation was worthwhile. Outsiders saw those deep pockets as organizers because they want to find and vilify organizers of such a movement. It has sustained for way over a year (longer than you realize) not because it's a fad, but because millions of like-minded people were finally able to contact and coordinate each other thru social media networking - people who really do believe in Tea Party type views, and won't be giving up on their opinions any time soon.
The Tea Party is the kind of grassroots, high-tech, anarchistic, viral-meme, spontaneous-organization happening /. & Wired types have been predicting for some time. Just pisses a lot of 'em off that it was the "right wing" that actually did it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
You miss a major group. The indifferent. No one can care about every single problem, especially when the validity and importance changes from person to person. I can live quite happily with the WTO if equitable global trade occupies, say the 190th most important thing to me. So I'm not about to go out and protest. Sign a petition? Sure. Might mean I'm slightly more than indifferent but not too much.
Again, in the context of the article, this category is the problem. Loose associations created through social media only foster indifferent connections.
I don't. Any entity that can mobilize resources to track down anyone on the planet who does something truly offensive -like kill cats- and bring them to justice, all the while remaining invisible to the eyes of any authority, is worthy of respect and fear. So far Anonymous has been content with taking on Scientology (which has long needed to be done).
What I wonder is, how powerful is Anonymous, and the boards that host it? Does Anonymous have any limit to it's power? I find myself hoping not, because IMHO, Anonymous, ED, and 4chan are the first, last, and best lines of defense for freedom, self-expression, and individuality. If they go, we're all well and truly f*cked.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
effectiveness of a protest is related to the character of the group being protested
Disney has an enormous investment in its public face. If Winnie the Pooh became 0.1% less popular, it would cost Disney more than a million dollars per year.
How about a T-Shirt of a "money bags" Pooh trampling the Constitution? Holding an ACTA draft?
The creation and distribution will be engaged by Disney lawyers. But social media, weak ties, and low investment contribution (purchase and wear a T-Shirt), might here combine into significant impact.
protest, unchallenged, was not harmless to the status quo
"Now why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land? If you'd come today you could have reached the whole nation; Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication." -Judas, on Jesus' choice of time and place for his First Coming (Jesus Christ Superstar)
Say in the US, What leverage does the average citizen have over the government? They retooled the military to cut out the Vietnam problems. Taxes and elections are really the only leverage before violence. One can figure out how to avoid paying money to government, but they will just tax your children and grandchildren. The other possibility is electing better policy makers: Fair Elections Now Act is perhaps a step in this direction, and might be possible with social networking.
In the spirit of starting small, getting something working, and then iterating,
could one do a local social media campaign to change an individual local electoral race?
"Joe unquestionably has the election for town dogcatcher all sewn up. But Bob, with no chance of winning, is at least arguably a better candidate. But one politically less well "connected". Come on everyone! Regardless of your political affiliation! We don't care who owed what favor to whos dad! Clearly demonstrating that weak-tie social media can have a determining impact is a public good. An antidote to "we can do whatever we want - people don't care". It will improve the quality of our democracy. The race basically doesn't matter, so there's no downside. Vote for Bob, and a better, intelligent, networked world. If you weren't planning on voting, come by anyway, just to vote for Bob. This is doable. This we can do. This has a clear success condition. Let us do this, now, get it working, and then write our next test."
I have wondered what proportion of draft resisters were into high-minded pacifist morality, and how many were lazy/fearful/et cetera. Of course, it's possible to be both; also, people in category 2 may at least try to pass themselves off as being in category 1.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I've heard it said that air power * can clear the ground to some extent, but Army and/or Marines have to go in to secure and hold it.
* and naval vessels for shore targets; for example, naval bombardment was an important precursor to WWII Marine landings.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
At least Saddam isn't laughing at you any more, since the rest of us killed him, enjoy your consolation prize.
I know it likely wasn't intentional on your part but the rest of the world, you know all the onlookers that outnumbered you by orders of magnitude, just couldn't help noticing how happy the dictatorship was about your indirect support of them. Hell those idiots in Baghdad even thought your anti-war demonstrations would help save their authoritarian asses, they just couldn't understand the games being played could they? Then again likely neither do you.
So what's next? Feel up for demonstrating against the next wars against the next tyrants? You know they're coming.
Ever considered that the war you demonstrated against could have been avoided if you and others like you hadn't inflated the sense of security the dictatorship had? Or perhaps not enough people would bother support the war unless they saw hordes of idiots defending tyranny against democracy?
What was the purpose of the demonstrations? Not necessarily your purpose but the purpose of those arranging things? Ever consider that at all? What kind of peace were you demonstrating for? Do you even know?
Isn't it peculiar how so many can be bothered to protest wars when our own societies wants to remove dictatorships but when we're not involved hardly anyone can be bothered to protest far worse wars or outright atrocities in Asia and Africa? Only strange if one doesn't attribute ulterior motives right?
I kind of thought you were smarter before.
[Some of today's successful activists are] purely self-interested, like gun owners and gays.
What would you say about those who are not in a particular group that are active for the interests/rights of that group?
Nevertheless, it does seem logical that people who are actually in the group would be more likely to be more concerned.
* There might also be secondary self-interest, or something else besides general altruism, such as a heterosexual gay-rights activist who was inspired to it by having a best friend who happens to be a homosexual.
Another big question is: is it *against* your self-interest to agitate for a group you carry no self-interest in, or is otherwise neutral?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Much of '60s activism was powered by music. That's over. Today's musicians have near zero political effect.
Amongst stuff that's mainstream (and thus has more/better chance at any impact), Lady Gaga and the gays sure comes to mind as a counterpoint. [Forget whatever quality difference you may believe exists in the music itself. *]
[ * As a tangent to that, even if you are of the mind that such a difference prominently exists, keep in mind that we tend to remember really good old music and tend to forget really bad music; thus, we might tend to overrate the decade overall because of the rose-tinted glasses of memory.]
In any timeframe, I do ask if the activist music has an effect.
Nevertheless, I agree with your implied core point/assumption there, the power of musicians (which I generalized to most any category of entertainer) to get attention for $cause, if they use it for those purposes. It's an important phenomenon to comprehend.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
When someone is a jerk, and news of their being a jerk goes viral on the Internet, a soul-incinerating beam of wrath locks onto them and changes their lives forever. Sometimes they kill themselves. Sometimes the authorities become part of the mob and prosecute their being a jerk with a fervor that would not have existed otherwise. Sometimes their phone begins to ring night and day, and every human on the other end heaps stinging hatred upon them. Sometimes they delete all of their online accounts, change their names, and move to try to escape it. When mass hatred goes viral, it is more intense than any court in history has ever been. I have never seen it fail. Malcolm doesn't get this aspect of social media and the Internet.
I liked your point, and agree with it to the extent. Still, there are other social dynamics at work here moving in a post-scarcity direction towards a fundamental social change where "success" is redefined as it takes fewer people to produce enough for everyone. So, powerful tools can change how we can and should use them if we are to avoid irony (as suggested in my sig line).
And then, there is the issue of what sorts of internet tools groups of various sorts really need to be healthy groups. I'm not sure anyone fully understands that yet. And it may vary based on the group, even with some groups maybe being better off without any internet tools?
From something my wife just wrote: ... I still think the internet doesn't work very well for small groups working together towards common goals, and I still want to help it get better at that. But this experience has given me new respect for what extraverted people can do with extraverted tools, and a new interest in supporting interactions among both introverts and extraverts. I'd say the most important thing I have learned in the past week is this. People who care about social activism on the internet need to be more aware of how our own personalities affect what we think everyone needs. And we need to build tools that work with, not just in spite of, our diverse ways of interacting. It's not good enough to say our tools work for some ways of interacting and connecting -- yours or mine. We need to make everyone part of the solution, if we don't want to build more problems."
"It takes all kinds, even on the internet"
http://www.storycoloredglasses.com/2010/10/it-takes-all-kinds-even-on-internet.html
"Sadly, the thing Gladwell gets wrong (and lots of people have already pointed this out so I won't elaborate) is that weak and strong ties, and hierarchies and meshworks, are not polar opposites. They intermingle and interpenetrate, and they influence and sometimes become each other. I agree that social media support weak ties more than they support strong ties. But people interact in many ways. The whole thing is not as simple or strong as he makes it out -- and that in itself is telling, as I will explain.
So, tools can make a big difference to *groups*, in terms of affecting group dynamics. Clay Shirky talks a little about this in "A group is its own worst enemy".
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
Or Doug Englebart's point on the need for a goupr and its tools to co-evolve.
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/vision-highlights.html
Your point certainly applies to individuals and connects to "a bad crasftsman blames his tools".
But what if you are a tool maker, not just a tool user? What do you learn from all this discussion and experience about how to change the nature of our social tools to promote or sustain key values of democracy/accountability, joy, health, prosperity, community, and intrinsic/mutual security?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Anonymous sustained a year long campaign against the church of Scientology using weak ties and a lack of hierarchy. People took risks and some were arrested. Hmm.
Much of '60s activism was powered by music. That's over. Today's musicians have near zero political effect.
Is the effect is positive or negative? :P
People who don't like the entertainer and their product might think less of the associated sociopolitical opinions.
Agreeing with someone's sociopolitical opinions just because you find them entertaining is clearly rather stupid.
So, entertainers who are politically outspoken have power over the sheep, just as do other politicians and pundits.
There’s no reason why you can’t agree with The Entertainer and The Activist aspects separately. (although I’m still careful to avoid cross-influence) For example, an eloquent pro-gay speech by Lady Gaga may not be more righteous than the same thing attributed to Jane Doe, but it's no _less_ righteous, Eh? Eh? The only difference is that Ms. Germanotta has a larger platform than Ms. Doe *.
* IMHO, there may be some correlation; in short, being good at expressing oneself might show up in both art and politics. What makes you a master performer might also make you a master debater. C causing both A and B is quite fine.
The method of activism may be found annoying outside of entertainment as well, also with the effect of the activism ironically not being the intended one. For example, Gavin Newsom's "This door's wide open now. [Legally-recognized homosexual marriage is] going to happen, whether you like it or not." statement may have turned some people away from voting against Prop 8.
*If the annoying activist is at all representative of what they're an activist for*, then it may make sense for that to garner less sympathy.
I suppose "right thing for the wrong reason" is a useless philosophical sidebar if it's the right thing anyway. Don't end up doing the wrong thing just because you're afraid of doing the right thing *for a 'bad' reason.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
It may also depend on the union; some may be more focused on their specific niche, some may be focused on workers in general.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You don't hear people discussing the telephone and it's impact on " driving systemic social change, comparing them to the organizational strategies of the 1960s civil rights movement".
Social networking itself drives squat. It's just another way of communicating. It's the communication that's carried over (whatever technology) that's important.
You could, but I accidentally the revolution!
If you don't believe it tell 4chan you threw a cat on a trashcan