>On Sat, 12 Feb 2011, Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>>Me too, but having said that, it seems that new communications
>>technologies have played important roles in some of the major uprisings
>>of the past thirty years. During the run-up to the Iranian Revolution,
>>when Khomeini was still living in exile in Paris, his sermons and
>>speeches would be tape recorded and the cassettes would then be smuggled
>>into Iran. Those cassettes helped him to get his message into Iran. A
>>decade later during the Tiansmen Square protests, student activists were
>>making use of faxes to get their word out, both to their fellow activists
>>and to Western news media.
>
>Right, but to the extent that Facebook and blogs are serving as functional
>equivalents for cassettes and faxes, this is actually an argument that
>"social media" make no difference qua social media -- that they work
>exactly like every other media that have come before: they get out a message.
>
>The claim that "social media" make a difference rests on the idea that
>their distinctive quality -- their interactivity -- contributes something
>that previous media have not.
>
>Michael
It puts pressure on you to participate - something like EffBee does anyway. If you go to a demo or meeting or action, and then everyone posts updates and photos and videos, there's pressure on people to show up. There was an interesting piece out recently, can't recall what it was now, but the authors of a study said that EffBee is depressing for some people. They see everyone else posting about going to this party or that vacation, and their lives seem less exciting than others' lives. Well, if you can't afford a vacation or weren't invited to the party, that's one thing. But going to a demo or meeting doesn't generally require a lot of money and you don't have to be popular to belong/show up/help out.
the other things is, at least my experience in social organizing (not movement type stuff) is that it's used for people who largely already know each other or could know each other, but maybe didn't know of each other. Some of the stuff related to arts and culture -- pressure on the city to build bike lanes/path; getting city to create more greenspace; a lot of Richard Florida inspired folderol (Zombie Apocalypse; flash mobs); expanding funding for Gay Pride Day; street-inspired art shows; busking; etc. -- blossomed as EffBee was used as launching pad to bring people together to do things they wouldn't have known others were interested in doing. Off the top of my head, within a year of one of the young activists in town getting things going on Facebook, there have been about 10 successful projects among cultural activisits, artists, musicians trying to improve the cultural life in this town.
It also helps that you can get to know people and have a sense of who they are via facebook. That way, when you work together on a project, you get out of the way a lot of the social interaction required to build trust and commitment between a group of people.
Whether this translates to social movements, where the stakes are higher and the risks greater, no idea....
But my argument has always been that, if you nurture civic life, then you help till and fertilize the soil for when a politically-oriented social movement erupts. These people, adept at organizing for other reasons, have the skills and connections/networks that are tapped for other purposes. Knowing how to produce flyers, posters, letters, raise funds, organize a project, motivate people, etc., these are all skills crucial to a social movement.
I ranted at Doug awhile back about my involvement with a left worker movement in town. They drove me batshit insane because they simply... well, fuckmedead, if they didn't need a godamned project manager. They didn't know the first thing about building consensus among participants, how to create deadlines, how to plan out milestones... I came out of that experience convinced that the left is just fucked in that regard.
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)