Social Networking Is Not Social Activism

This week The New Yorker has an essay by Malcolm Gladwell in which he argues that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are not nearly as powerful tools of political activism as they’ve been hyped to be.  (See Moldova and Iran for the main examples.)  It’s a great piece, and I highly recommend reading it through (it’s not nearly as long as many New Yorker essays).  Here’s Gladwell’s argument in a nutshell:

The evangelists of social media…seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires….  Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.

Right on, Malcolm.  I think he gets it exactly right: “Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of hard.”  It requires lots of hard work engaging with people face-to-face, and it often gets dangerous.  And sitting behind a computer screen not only distances members of a “movement,” those expending the energy to “like” a cause, it also exacerbates social justice issues.  There is a huge gap in who has access to technology.  Can internet activism ever been an accurate face of social change if it is synonymous with the faces of privilege?

The New York Times’ “Room for Debate” invited several experts to respond to Gladwell’s article, and they’ve generally found his argument meritorious but overstated.  The gist of their responses has been, “Sure, Twitter can’t do it all, but surely social networking helps activism at least a little bit.”  They’ve got a point, too, but I think they miss how the dynamic of these social networks operates.  Facebook and Twitter are very effective at getting information out, but just by virtue of how they work, they shift the nature of that information from a potential political tool to a piece of a large, complex, self-revising conversation going on within the network.  This isn’t in itself a bad thing, but it’s not how activism gets done.

One “Room for Debate” response by William Powers expresses the desire for traditional tools and social networks to work together on the political battlefield: “Digital networking and more traditional forms of communication aren’t mutually exclusive – they feed into each other.”  This is easier said than done, but the only way we can accomplish it is if we avoid Twitter messianism and stick to the bread and butter of activism: good hard work with real, flesh-and-blood people.

–Aaron Bekemeyer