On Sat, 12 Feb 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
> the idea is the same: solidarities generated through contact and common
> experience. Electronic relationships are usually more tenuous than that.
Up until now, I've generally been on that side of the argument. I've thought successful organizing tends to use new media just like we used to use posters, pamphlets and pacifica: to tell people where to gather and get out news. And that really new things, like million people groups on Facebook, tend to have no effect at all. There are wonderful exceptions, like the recent defense of that Brooklyn prof, where the new connectivity really seems to do something both new and effective. But so far IME such cases are tantalizingly rare.
However, the article that started off this thread:
and which seems to have been little referred to since, made several concrete points that make me think that, in Egypt at least, Facebook and blogging have made a big difference, and might even have been a sine non que.
Among those points:
1) That people organized solely through Facebook and Egyptian blogs organized and attended demonstrations from 2004-2007 against the succession of Mubarak's son Gamal. These were demonstrations where they risked getting beaten up and thrown in jail -- in other words, exactly the kind of substantial actions where you make a sacrifice that people connected solely by virtual connections are not supposed to be able to pull off.
That certainly seems noting in re the Gladwell argument that I posted earlier:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
It's a solid counterexample until someone shows why it isn't true. It seems completely comparable to the first diner sit-downs that he cites.
2) That the blogs made a large faction of the press oppositional. After causing what is now a classic 2.0 scandal by circulating a cell phone video of a guy getting tortured by police, the blogs gained new credibility and many more people started doing it. People reported on the everyday harassment by the state on a large scale, and the papers started citing the blogs as evidence. The result was that corruption and repression became thematized and stories became shared. It became a national topic of discussion.
Obviously this doesn't happen by itself; it hasn't happened here in the US where the blog/newspaper conduit seems to been largely baleful. But in the situation of Egypt, it seems to have made a substantial progressive difference. One could perhaps say that samizdat accomplished the same thing in Poland in the late 70s, creating and expanding a public sphere. But that's simply to say: it made a difference.
3) Everyone knows the big event in the history of the Egyptian opposition was the April 6th 2008 strike. But there was already a vigorous independent labor movement in Egypt. There have been 3000 strikes since 2004. What made the April 6 strike so enormous -- what made the strike of a factory of textile workers into a general strike -- was the call on Facebook for a sympathy strike. That seems to have been undertaken completely independently, and to have blossomed and then been actually acted on on very large national scale. And to have created thereafter exactly the kind of social resonance that every progressive labor movement dreams of and so few get nowadays.
Meanwhile, out of it grew the Kefiya movement, which seems to be largely a human rights movement mediated by the internet. But one that can put bodies on the street and affect what gets in the news.
4) The last point is the author's idea that the 1000s of blogs allowed groups that previously had never worked together, the Islamicists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the secular youth and labor activists, to forge a common language -- the "one egypt" idea. If that's true, that really does seem like something new -- something that depends on interactivity, on being able to have a discussion, rather than just read something that has been transmitted.
On the face of it, cross reading of blogs by people in different camps seems to have had exactly the opposite effect in Egypt that it has here, where it just makes people more extreme and more opposed. There it seems to have gotten all factions to tone down their language and find a reasonable common core -- and to be enthused by precisely this building of bridges.
It's only article. It doesn't prove anything. But it's well written and plausible, and it deals with a concrete and supremely topical case, rather than social media and activism in general.
At first sight, it seems that perhaps social media can have different -- even opposite -- effects under different circumstances. Perhaps where the state is a lot more repressive, and people are a lot more discontented, the effect of social media is different?
I don't mean by any of this to underplay how crucially the Egyptian uprising is a labor movement, and a youth movement, and how much the final crisis had to do with the large mass of actual physical bodies in the square. And that people basically learned about what's going on the square about through old fashioned TV and radio even if its coming over the computer. Even the famous google guy interview was a TV interview.
But still in all, those 4 points above seem worth considering. It seems possible that sometimes, social media really can make a difference. And that they can amplify the old media in ways that can make a quantum difference. (Probably 100-fold more people saw the google guy interview than if it had been a one shot on TV.)
And if someone wants to argue that he's wrong about any of these points, I'll all ears. But it might focus the discussion. And I think we have to admit he makes a case worth hearing. Which for me, is a first.
Michael