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Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell makes some criticisms of online activism. He does have some valid points but they are lost in disingenuous "back in my day…" illogic, and it annoyed me enough that I felt like ranting. This may seem like a coherent argument but it was written in one sitting at 5am, I'm sure there's aspects I've missed.
The basic structure of his argument, and many similar ones I've seen is to say:
The 1960s civil rights movement and modern day effective activism in countries that do not have much access to the internet worked/works through hierarchy and old fashioned communication etc.
Most people and groups associated with online activism achieve very little.
The internet is mostly used to support the status quo.
Q.E.D. the internet is ineffective and a tool of the Man.
But this is meaningless unless you answer the following questions:
How does current effective activism in the US and other places that do have the internet work?
If we define "people associated with offline activism" just as loosely (and he included everyone who joined a "Save Darfur" Facebook group, which is like counting everyone willing to wear a free "Save Darfur" sticker) then are they any better?
Are other communications media any less inclined to support the status quo?
I'm only going to discuss the US since that's where the (english speaking) internet is mainly based and it's people in the US he's really talking about. If you let the focus expand it you get unhelpful digressions into whether or not the common people use twitter in Romania. The fact that rich white Americans who use the internet tend not to be very effective activists in my opinion has more to do with their rich white American-ness than their being on the internet (not that everyone online is a rich white American. But that's the subtext to his argument). Overall he seems to be saying "People on the internet suck" without addressing whether or not they suck more than people in general.
I've blurred "the internet" and "social media" a bit, but so did he.
It is for example all well and good to talk about how going to protests in the US in the 1960s could get you killed, but these days it won't. If his bar for "real activism" means you have to be in danger then most people who go to modern rallies aren't doing "real" activsm. So what are the modern US activists willing to put themselves on the line today doing? Are they using the internet to do it or not? (I'm not sure I can answer this question. But he doesn't even come close to asking it) If the US has no effective activism these days as he would define it then there being none in the US-dominated parts of the internet is just part of a wider trend (which I suppose you could blame the internet for if you wanted but you'd be stretching).
I'm pretty sure that in the 1960s there were a whole heap of lazy posers who liked to vaguely associate themselves with the civil rights movement but did nothing beyond maybe singing protest songs in their own house to their friends. And that if you took the average donation to any offline charity that allowed for easy small donations (eg the salvation army and their tins) it wouldn't be much larger than the average donation to a Facebook group.
And all communication media are used to support the status quo. He's right that the people who see the internet and social media etc primarily as a wonderful tool for freedom are glossing over a lot of negative uses, but people do that.
So, that said, I shall now attempt to address his actual points.
His first point is that real activism involves putting yourself at risk and making a genuine sacrifice, and that people will usually only do this when connected to other activists by very strong emotional ties. This I think I mostly agree with.
He then says that online "friendship" is always very shallow, and not strong enough to motivate people to genuinely inconvenience themselves, so that you'll have 20,000 people in a Facebook charity donating an average of 35 cents.
This, in my opinion, confuses the mean with the mode: online "friendship" is often very shallow, and online "activism" sometimes has an incredibly low bar for joining in on some level (though so does real life activism, sometimes), so you get more people who don't really care and aren't willing to go to any real trouble. Thus the average contribution may go down. But that doesn't mean that the total effect is less, that there isn't a core of committed people with very strong emotional ties who are genuinely putting themselves on the line and making an actual difference. They're just harder to see through the noise.
His second is that effective social justice organisations need a hierarchy. To judge this properly I think you need to look at how effective modern day US activist groups work, and I don't know enough about them to say. But comparing the social structure of 1960s social justice groups with modern online ones is silly.
The temptation here is to start listing online activist groups and the good works and sacrifices they have made. But without modern day US activist groups to compare to there's no way to make an argument either way. From what I have heard I get the impression that small less hierarchical groups dealing with local issues are very common, and if we define "local" as "the places I hang out" then a lot of internet activism has the same structure (where "local" for me would be Western Australia but also scifi and fanfic fandom) It might be interesting to compare the online and offline arms of the Prop 8 fight for example. And maybe the offline aspects are more effective, but either way this article is pretty useless for deciding.
There's also the ableist erasing of people who can't go to rallies etc, and in the other direction you could talk about the classist erasing by internet advocates of people too poor to have the internet. But in either case you'd need to think about how activism actually works in the US today and he didn't get that far.
The basic structure of his argument, and many similar ones I've seen is to say:
The 1960s civil rights movement and modern day effective activism in countries that do not have much access to the internet worked/works through hierarchy and old fashioned communication etc.
Most people and groups associated with online activism achieve very little.
The internet is mostly used to support the status quo.
Q.E.D. the internet is ineffective and a tool of the Man.
But this is meaningless unless you answer the following questions:
How does current effective activism in the US and other places that do have the internet work?
If we define "people associated with offline activism" just as loosely (and he included everyone who joined a "Save Darfur" Facebook group, which is like counting everyone willing to wear a free "Save Darfur" sticker) then are they any better?
Are other communications media any less inclined to support the status quo?
I'm only going to discuss the US since that's where the (english speaking) internet is mainly based and it's people in the US he's really talking about. If you let the focus expand it you get unhelpful digressions into whether or not the common people use twitter in Romania. The fact that rich white Americans who use the internet tend not to be very effective activists in my opinion has more to do with their rich white American-ness than their being on the internet (not that everyone online is a rich white American. But that's the subtext to his argument). Overall he seems to be saying "People on the internet suck" without addressing whether or not they suck more than people in general.
I've blurred "the internet" and "social media" a bit, but so did he.
It is for example all well and good to talk about how going to protests in the US in the 1960s could get you killed, but these days it won't. If his bar for "real activism" means you have to be in danger then most people who go to modern rallies aren't doing "real" activsm. So what are the modern US activists willing to put themselves on the line today doing? Are they using the internet to do it or not? (I'm not sure I can answer this question. But he doesn't even come close to asking it) If the US has no effective activism these days as he would define it then there being none in the US-dominated parts of the internet is just part of a wider trend (which I suppose you could blame the internet for if you wanted but you'd be stretching).
I'm pretty sure that in the 1960s there were a whole heap of lazy posers who liked to vaguely associate themselves with the civil rights movement but did nothing beyond maybe singing protest songs in their own house to their friends. And that if you took the average donation to any offline charity that allowed for easy small donations (eg the salvation army and their tins) it wouldn't be much larger than the average donation to a Facebook group.
And all communication media are used to support the status quo. He's right that the people who see the internet and social media etc primarily as a wonderful tool for freedom are glossing over a lot of negative uses, but people do that.
So, that said, I shall now attempt to address his actual points.
His first point is that real activism involves putting yourself at risk and making a genuine sacrifice, and that people will usually only do this when connected to other activists by very strong emotional ties. This I think I mostly agree with.
He then says that online "friendship" is always very shallow, and not strong enough to motivate people to genuinely inconvenience themselves, so that you'll have 20,000 people in a Facebook charity donating an average of 35 cents.
This, in my opinion, confuses the mean with the mode: online "friendship" is often very shallow, and online "activism" sometimes has an incredibly low bar for joining in on some level (though so does real life activism, sometimes), so you get more people who don't really care and aren't willing to go to any real trouble. Thus the average contribution may go down. But that doesn't mean that the total effect is less, that there isn't a core of committed people with very strong emotional ties who are genuinely putting themselves on the line and making an actual difference. They're just harder to see through the noise.
His second is that effective social justice organisations need a hierarchy. To judge this properly I think you need to look at how effective modern day US activist groups work, and I don't know enough about them to say. But comparing the social structure of 1960s social justice groups with modern online ones is silly.
The temptation here is to start listing online activist groups and the good works and sacrifices they have made. But without modern day US activist groups to compare to there's no way to make an argument either way. From what I have heard I get the impression that small less hierarchical groups dealing with local issues are very common, and if we define "local" as "the places I hang out" then a lot of internet activism has the same structure (where "local" for me would be Western Australia but also scifi and fanfic fandom) It might be interesting to compare the online and offline arms of the Prop 8 fight for example. And maybe the offline aspects are more effective, but either way this article is pretty useless for deciding.
There's also the ableist erasing of people who can't go to rallies etc, and in the other direction you could talk about the classist erasing by internet advocates of people too poor to have the internet. But in either case you'd need to think about how activism actually works in the US today and he didn't get that far.
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The internet is a tool that definitely can be and is used by activists of all stripes. Its most obvious use is in communicating between otherwise separated groups. Take the example of the Countryside Alliance in this country, which gobsmacked 'traditional' activists by its ability to get very large numbers of people to rallies and marches on very short notice. That partly reflects the strength of feeling of course, but it also represents how good the communications network is and an awful lot of it was done by email networks spreading the news. Something that would have taken weeks or months can now take a few days.
It's also a good research tool but also, with things like Wikipedia, a means of spreading information with a particular political slant. In a world where all information is equal, nobody dominates what opinions others can form.
If he thinks activists aren't using the internet maybe he needs to look beyond his narrow definition of an activist. The Tea Party in the US seems to be using the internet very effectively. So are the numerous groups of all persuasions in the Middle East. So are hundreds of thousands of other organisations from small local charities to international movements. People who still think just marching in the street makes any difference may well be using the internet ineffectively - but then they are probably doing everything else ineffectively as well.