This is a response to the New Yorker article Sarah posted on Facebook, "Small Change," written about two months before this moronic cartoon character anti-child abuse campaign* started, but certainly applicable. It's an interesting piece, and all its points about the futility and idiocy of making a change to one's ephemeral online persona in order to support an activist cause are generally good. Unfortunately, however, it strikes me, like so many New Yorker pieces do, as thoroughly patronizing and extremely unself-aware. I know this is a literary piece and not a scientific study, but the points the author makes are based on comparison of "internet-age" activism and civil-rights era activism, and the things he's comparing are simply not comparable.
The author's point, like most people who complain about these things (including myself), is that the internet and social media are lowering the standards of activism so that someone can feel warm and fuzzy about helping abused children without actually having done jack shit - "slactivism" is the incredibly annoying neologism I've read a few times to describe this phenomenon. As anyone arguing about the activism (or lack thereof) of young people today must do, Gladwell brings up the rightly legendary sacrifices of the civil rights protestors, marchers, etc. And hey, maybe a little shame would get some people (again, including myself) off their asses and out to an actual protest. But, it's really not a good argument he's making.
Gladwell is essentially saying that we can compare the 500 million users of Facebook (and OK, not all of them are students) to the tens of thousands of student activists who did so much in the fight for civil rights. Can anyone spot the problem here? He's taken the top couple percent of the 50's and 60's student population in terms of activism and is claiming that since more people than live in the United States are not doing the same work that they did, the internet must be making us soft.
Now, by saying what I'm about to say, I am being equally non-evidence-based as Gladwell was, but I'm going to say it anyway. I would put my money on the internet and social media in fact increasing rates of activism among young people - if we look at the number of students today who are active comparably to the civil rights activists. The problem here isn't that it's so easy to do something meaningless - it's ALWAYS been easy to do something meaningless. The problem is that those meaningless things are so much more visible now. For every civil rights activist - and anti-civil rights activist - in the 50's and 60's, there were lots of people who didn't do anything - just like changing your profile picture doesn't do anything. The problem is that no one knew they weren't doing anything, because there wasn't a global platform for them to not do anything on!
Anyway. Sorry this is so badly written, I have been working non-stop for the past week and my brain is rather tired. Also, since Dave and Ben are both unlikely to have blog access for the next little while, I guess it's just me, Sarah, and Lion (and maybe Dan) on this one.
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* I would like to point out that my profile picture has been Milhouse since October 22, and that changing it from a cartoon character to something else to avoid the campaign would simply be giving in to the moronism.
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First, I want to give my appreciation for the parenthetical shout-out. It makes me feel like a fully-realized subjective entity, with a real and verifiable connection to the objective, outside world!
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I do wish I'd read this earlier. I have been freelancing for a beta-version social networking tool called placeforpeople.com that is billing itself as the place for active/activist citizens to connect and create campaigns - to get real, local work done without the static interference of all those facebook petitions and kOoKy apps. For me, it's a great chance to learn what people are doing in the city(ies) I live in, but as a tool for social change, I am somewhat cynical.
There are two ways for people to get involved in social activism - they can be moved enough by a cause to start taking action to change it, or they can learn that people are taking action and decide to support it. Even (or especially) when the target group consists exclusively of self-declared activists, the proliferation of possible campaigns inevitably dilutes the attention, money, and other resources of individuals committed to social change. Meanwhile, the potential for an "inactivist" to become "activist-ated" (what's the point of blogging if you can't make up words?), is corrupted by the glut of unfiltered "information" that pervades their online experience. The principle of the internet is that individual pages link to others equally, and with flash scrolls, status updates,and most of all, Google, the functional relationship between "home page" and "front page" is becoming rapidly more distant. In other words, there is no longer a dominant media to filter out certain stories as representative of "the" counter-culture, and since all news events are quickly subsumed by whatever follows them, the news "story" itself is becoming replaced by series of facts.
The purpose, or at least, the effect of a story is to demonstrate the significance of certain events over others. When there is no coherent framework for creating narrative (i.e., no editorial "voice"), there is similarly no coherence to the counter-narrative forces. Each new activist cause proposed on social media networks has roughly the same persuasive potential as an individual youtube video. Millions may view or "like" it, and many may comment, but one comment pushes the previous ones down and out of sight. Before any real discussion, or real action takes place, another cause has pushed the first one into web "history" (itself a mis-appropriated metaphor, lacking any narrative or organizational structure besides chronology).
In the end, the people who would support particular causes anyway are likely to continue supporting those causes, and have a vehicle to facilitate their communications, but more often, they risk becoming distracted by other dire needs, or even Jimmy's new hairdo. Inevitably, many people will resort to taking only what social activism can be accomplished from their computer desks, and since social media pervades the lives of traditional activists (young students, etc), they are increasingly being replaced by other demographics who still pay attention to traditional media (eg, Fox News).
In the end, real change in the real world is rarely accomplished virtually. The group who goes door to door and gets thousands of inky signatures will always triumph over the individual internet petitioners with millions of virtual signatures, because the former involves more work. Real commitment, and real risk, will always carry more weight than even the most persuasively argued blog comment, and that appellation does not apply to this one, so with that, I have to go do some real Christmas shopping.
Well, I'm not sure I agree with your final paragraph. The virtual means to make change have only really exist in a universal sense for about a decade. Give it another couple of those and we'll talk.
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