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."
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.
Which revolution did those protests successfully pull off? Did the 1999 protests in Seattle even meaningfully slow down the WTO, much less kill it?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
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...
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.
That when the revolution does come, Mark Zuckerburg is the first against the wall.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Because protests actually affect anything in the slightest anymore?
In the heyday of protesting the huge protest was new, rare, impressive, and scary. News media outlets were limited and protests were big new(s), which amplified their impression, excitement, and scary nature (scary to those being protested against). And they protested things that actually, really mattered. War and peace, freedom and oppression.
But today?
At least in the US protests are a dime a dozen. Huge protests maybe a quarter a dozen. Decades of ever increasing protests for every single cause from global threats against humanity to legalizing pet ferrets, protests have lost their bite. They've lost it because protesting never had any real bite. The huge over use of protesting taught The Man that protests really don't mean anything...they don't really don't hurt...they are mostly all bark, no bite. In the flood of 24/7 news outlets, protests rarely get much if any attention. There's just too many for too stupid of causes for anyone to care to pay attention when real ones for real causes happen.
Social media "protests" may be too weak to have any real effect...but neither are actual, feet on the ground, protests.
My
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.
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.
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.
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n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The Battle of Seattle did nothing to slow down the WTO, the mass protests against the Gulf War did nothing at all. Mass protests against WTO, G8, etc do nothing but damage some property, get people arrested and hurt and get overtime for security forces.
And what happened? Prop 8 passed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prop_8#Results
Very true.
The last protest I took part in was the worldwide march against the Iraq War. There were literally millions of people marching across the world. Most major cities globally had at least a few hundred thousand people all protesting against it. But the war happened anyway, and by and large the protests achieved absolutely nothing. Most politicians and pundits didn't even comment on them, at the time or since.
So forget popular protest. If you want to make a difference or change the world, buy a newspaper.
May the Maths Be with you!
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."
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.
That's a very good point. The main reason for "democratic" popuplation to be manipulated to elect a certain establishment is to guarantee subsequent consent: "did not you _freely_ elected this?"
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Because protests actually affect anything in the slightest anymore?
Tea Party is having quite an impact I would say. Or do you not count is as a protest unless windows get broken and cars burned?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Meh, what's the point to life without freedom? Why bother getting out of the way if it will just lead to a world where those who lead (via lying, cheating, coercion, and so on) prey upon those who follow? See, the way I see it, there are three types of people in the world:
1) Those who recognize problems and run away from them.
2) Those who recognize problems and fix them.
3) Those who don't recognize problems.
They world's always been a rough place. That hasn't stopped our species from doing some absolutely amazing things. Keeping your head down and hiding in a hole while those around you are beaten down is just pathetic.
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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.
No, not confusing it - just using the OP's parallel with the WTO protests, which all mutated into riots a good deal quicker than the Austerity protests in Barcelona which were peaceful until well into the afternoon. In both cases, protest and riot, the net result is effectively nil, and if anything will have made the situation worse in the case of Barcelona et al. The WTO continues to operate as it always has, and the Spanish government will enact austerity measures because like every other nation in Spain's situation no one has yet come up with a better solution to the problem of burgeoning national debts. Being able to mount an effective protest, or riot for that matter, is kind of moot when no one is listening.
As for things getting worse, at dawn yesterday many of the streets around Placa Catalunya and La Ramblas still bore extensive graffiti, residue from fires, vandalized ATMs, broken windows and strewn litter. Today, apart from a few bits of graffiti, it's all gone and it's business as usual; the 29th might as well never have happened, with one exception. There's going to be a bill for all that extra policing, fire fighting and maintenance work (possibly at overtime rates since much of it seems to have been done overnight), and ultimately it's getting added onto the Spanish national debt.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
What I'm about to claim is a fairly subtle distinction, but bear with me as it makes a big difference.
Overuse of protests has not made protests weaker. You might say it has produced an increasing proportion of examples in which protests are ineffective. The distinction is in the causal relationships.
It isn't that using protests as an everyday tactic leads to weak protests. It's that protests are effective for certain types of cause. Use of protests against other types of causes will lead simultaniously to two symptoms: many protests, and weak protests. So yes, you see a correlation between frequency and weakness, but it is not because one causes the other.
The difference is, even today if 60's-style protest tactics were used against an appropriate opponent for an appropriate cause, they would work as they did then. A nonviolent sit-in draws much of its strength by painting a salient moral picture in the public eye. It creates a confrontation, and observers see one side peacefully asserting their position and being bullied by the other side. This can be used to mobilize public opinion.
But when you use the same tactics to oppose 'the man' not because he's the kind of person that would turn a fire hose on you, but because that's how you want to perceive him... well, then you have a problem. He never attacks you, never cedes the moral high ground, and the whole incident goes unnoticed.
The risk faced by the 60's activists was a key factor in their success, because their function was to shed light on exactly that risk as a symptom of the social status quo. Take that risk element away (by applying the tactics to the wrong kind of adversary) and you increase the number of protests - because it's easier to get people to join in - while reducing their effectiveness.
In part, this implies that the effectiveness of a protest is related to the character of the group being protested. Could the pro-segregation establishment have ignored the sit-ins to cause them to go away? Well, no, because of the alignment of those protests as a defiance of "the rules" - not just a statement of dissent. For four black students to sit at a "whites only" lunch counter, they were assured an aggressive response at some level because their protest, unchallenged, was not harmless to the status quo. For the establishment not to respond would be to concede - "you really can sit here".
But by contrast if a group stands outside an abortion clinic with picket signs, how does that force any response at all? Such a protest is usually ineffective not merely because it is perceived as a lesser threat to the establishment do to overexposure, but because it is a lesser threat by its own nature. Unlike a lunch counter sit-in, the only way for either side to "lose" in this confrontation is to be the first one to turn violent.
protests would be bigger news if people were allowed to mass protest on whatever public land they wanted to, none of this permit-only or free-speech zone bullshit.
...
I know a lot of iranian protestors who seemed convinced otherwise.
How'd that work for them now that Iran is a vibrant and bustling democracy?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
No, Fox News is having quite an impact. If they didn't want the Tea Party to achieve its aims, not only would it be totally ineffective, it probably wouldn't even exist. Of course, it's in their interests to portray the Tea Party movement rather than themselves as the important ones because that's easier to sell, but without Fox they'd be nothing.
In fact, there's a good argument that Fox News in effect created the Tea Parties.
4Chan could do it though.
See, the way I see it, there are three types of people in the world:
1) Those who recognize problems and run away from them.
2) Those who recognize problems and fix them.
3) Those who don't recognize problems.
You're completely ignoring the fourth group.
4) Those who recognize problems as an opportunity to gain more power for themselves.
Sadly, most politicians fall into that last category.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
No. Clearly they didn't light enough cars on fire.
Who, the protesters or the cops masquerading as protesters? :P
The civil rights movement of the '60s didn't work in a single year either.
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.