the revolution will not be tweeted: outsized enthusiasm for social media
08:27, 14 October 2010
.. Posted in techculture and tech to help.. Link
The bloggers have been aghast at a recent New Yorker article, "Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. They cannot believe anyone would dare dispute the power of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other so-called online social networking.
Once again, I'm in the minority among online pundits: I think the article is dead on.
The article details how so much of what has been claimed about the use and impact of online social networking -- status updates on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. -- regarding street protests and activism in other countries, as well as right here in the USA, has actually been hot air. The article notes that Moldova’s and Iran's so-called "Twitter Revolutions" were, in fact, not either -- Twitter had scant internal significance in either country's street protests. Western journalists found posts by Western-based activists, and assumed they were reading dispatches from the countries. They weren't. Yes, maybe those Western bloggers and tweeters were in touch with people back in their home countries -- and maybe they weren't. Journalists never really tried to find out. They just ran with the story -- there's a Twitter revolution going on!
The New Yorker article notes this from historian Robert Darnton: “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” And the article adds, "But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is."
I have been promoting nonprofits use of the Internet since the mid 1990s. I had one of the first web sites to help nonprofits use computer and Internet technologies. I wrote one of the first guides on how nonprofits could leverage the Internet -- then made up primarily of USENET newsgroups and some new fangled thing called the World Wide Web -- and in that guide from the late 1990s, still available at archive.org. And in that guide, I opened with this caution:
Online technology can be a great asset to not-for-profit organizations (NPOs) and other community-service agencies. However, visions of becoming a super-efficient organization, reaching vastly larger numbers of new donors and clients, raising enormous amounts of new money and effortlessly administering an agency will not come to pass with an Internet account.
It's 15 years later after I first gave that advice in my guide, and I am still right.I still promote the use of computer and Internet technologies to nonprofits. I've made quite the name for myself promoting the idea of nonprofits involving and supporting volunteers via the internet: virtual volunteering. And I'm all for nonprofits exploiting Internet fads.
But I also staunchly believe that so much of what makes bloggers and journalists breathless about Internet activism or "micro-volunteerism" these days is just really slackervism, where people clicked something online, or did something equally simple online, and walked away thinking, "Wow, I really made a difference", but they didn't. A great example of slackervism was the fad earlier this year of people posting their bra color as their Facebook status, which was supposed to create some kind of awareness that wasn't there already about breast cancer -- I've already blogged about that ineffective, meaningless campaign already (and that blog includes tips on how this Facebook campaign could have actually been turned into something impactful, something that really did make a difference).
There are ways to turn online activities into offline action: more volunteers for your organization, more donors, more people writing their congresspeople about particular issues, even more people showing up at your street protest. But the rules for making a difference have not changed, and bragging about how often your tweet has been re-tweeted is no more impressive than telling me how many people passed by your billboard out on the highway. If online activities do not translate into more volunteers, new and repeat donors, new and repeat clients, greater onsite event attendance, legislation, or public pressure, they are just numbers.
Note to journalists: the next time you see a supposed revolution happening in some other country online, check your sources the old-fashioned way. And if mosts of those online messages you are seeing are in English, that right there should be your heads up that maybe most of the messages are coming from around the corner rather than around the world.
