----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
"I don't think he's missing that. In the end it seems like you guys are agreeing: social media are means for social movements to use just as social movement have always used media."
True, but tools are not neutral. They have qualities that affect the consciousness of the tool users and others. I'll never forget how impressed my dissert committee was when I brought in my prospectus printed on a laser printer in 1984!!!
Print in general has a finality, standardization, and polish that handwriting doesn't have. For full story see Ong's writing on oral vs written communication, and especially the effect of the printing press. There's an "imprimatur" quality to it which enhances the status of authorship and the truth value of the what is printed.
By contrast, the truth of social media ranges from the wacky to the consensual, but is far more evanescent.
"What makes social media like Facebook different than previous media like radio is that they create virtual communities. People share daily routines for lots of hours every day. They share personal information. They talk to each other and learn from each other. They "neighbor" as it used to be called. The only difference between these communities and all previous communities in history is that they are missing the face to face component."
I disagree. In societies that are deeply segregated -- say the U.S. today, by age, class, ethnicity -- you can join virtual communities that would otherwise be completely closed or inaccessible to you.
2) People can certainly make virtual friends this way that have large impacts on their emotional life and sense of self and even direction in life. Gladwell's question is whether these kind of communities can be the basis for collective political action. And his answer, for various reasons, is No -- that their collective political action will necessarily be virtual, just like the rest of their social relations.
"Gladwell is in effect arguing that political movements that change anything have to be based on real communities -- unions, parties, anything where people meet face to face. When you say that the point is that such groups can use this new stuff to be more effective, you seem to be implicitly agreeing with him."
"But Egypt may in fact show an example where this is not the case. Much of the recent uprising was and is based in real (i.e., face to face, bodily presence) communities -- parties, unions, the brotherhood -- and I think it's indisputable that without the participation of those real communities, it wouldn't have happened on anything like this scale. But the last 6 years in Egypt seem to give examples of virtual communities of the type described in (1) that were the basis of serious collective political action -- serious as a beating. And that their political actions played a crucial role in politics that had a big effect. Which seems to disprove Gladwell's thesis."
Yes.
___________________________________ Joanna