Dennis Claxton:
At 12:03 PM 2/10/2011, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>Saying that the civil rights movement succeedeed without social
>media so that means social media is nothing...will not do.
Pamphlets, brochures, radio broadcasts, movies, etc. aren't social media? .lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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I do not see how any of the new technology is particularly social; it's communication, but no faster in terms of what is needed under current conditions than was the telegraph under what was needed under _its_ conditions or .... Those parts of it which encourage persons in privacy to communicate with one person, also in privacy, could even be termed anti-social. That's not true, but my major point remains: speculation about empirical events in the present as though they could be understood leads to bad politics. The core of politics is at least a half dozen people together in the same room talking about how their group can be transformed into a number of similar groups linked in some way. The Bolsheviks in 1917, several observes noted, acted pretty much like each other WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO CONSULT OR RECEIVE ORDERS.
Politics, one could say, is political, NOT social.
What I'm trying to underline in several ways here is how foolish it is to make empirical predictions. Taken seriously, my observations are as foolish as I think Joanna's are. The present cannot be understood! Ever! That is why I reject Joanna's first response to Doug. She wants us to _understand the present, which is a mass of unintelligible data, with no way of establishing a perspective that distances it.
Carrol
Carrol