SOCIETY
The revolution will not be tweeting
The limits of political activism ; tico social networks
SUMMARY
activism on social networks like Facebook and Twitter stems from weak links between its participants, who are not at risk as the real traditional militant, united by strong ties, steel ; es hierarchical and high risk, such as those organized during the campaign for civil rights in America for 60 years.Malcolm Gladwell
translation PAUL Migliacci
TO FOUR AND A HALF the afternoon of Monday 1 / 2 / 1960, four students sat the lunch counter of a Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. Were freshmen at North Carolina A & T, for black college located just over 1 km away.
"A coffee, please," said one, Ezell Blair, the waitress.
"Do not serve niggers here," she said.
The long counter in L contained 66 seats, at one end, he ate himself up. The seats were for whites. The area where they ate was standing for blacks. Another employee, a charge of black glass, tried to convince them to leave: "You are being stupid, your ignorant." They did not move.
At about half past five main doors of the store were closed. The four remained there. Finally, left by a side door. From the outside, had formed a small crowd, including a photographer for the "Record" of Grensboro. "I'll be back tomorrow with the whole A & T College," said one of the university. On the morning
Next, the protest had spread and the group totaled 27 men and four women, in much of the same household of four original protesters. The men were in suits and ties. All material and were led on the counter, studying. On Wednesday came the accession of the college students "for niggers" of Greensboro, the Dudley High, and the number of protesters has risen to 80. On Thursday, there were already 300, including three whites, the local campus of the University of North Carolina.
On Saturday, the protest had 600 people, scattered on the sidewalks around the store. Teens watched white, waving flags Confederação.1 Somebody dropped a firecracker. At noon came the football team at A & T. "Here come the thugs," yelled one of the white students.
the second following the protest had already arrived in Winston-Salem, 40 miles away, and Durham, 80 km. The next day came the accession of students from Fayetteville State Teachers College and Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, followed on Wednesday by the students of St. Augustine's College and Shaw University in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest passed through the boundaries of the state and new manifestations appeared in Hampton and Portsmouth, Va., in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At the end of the month, similar events were being held across the southern United States, coming to Texas in the west.
FEVER
"I asked each of the students who had been found as the first day of protest on their campus," wrote political scientist Michael Walzer? In the journal "Dissent". "The response was always the same: 'It was a fever. Everyone wanted to participate '. "
Finally, about 70 000 students joined. Thousands were arrested, and many others were radicalized. These events of the early '60s became one of civil war that engulfed the southern United States by the end of the decade, and it all happened without e-mail, text messaging, Facebook or Twitter.
They say the world is undergoing a revolution. The new social networking tools reinvented social activism. With Facebook, Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will was reversed, which facilitates mutual collaboration and organization of the powerless and give voice to their concerns.
VIA TWITTER REVOLUTION
When 10 000 people took to the streets in Moldova, Eastern Europe, second quarter of 2009, in protest against the communist government, the action gained the name of revolution via Twitter, because the means used to engage the protesters.
Months later, when protests student shook Tehran, the U.S. State Department took the unusual step of asking the Twitter to suspend a scheduled break for site maintenance, because the government did not want a tool so vital was inactive at the height of the demonstrations. "Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt able and confident enough to come out in defense of freedom and democracy," wrote former national security adviser, Mark Pfeifle, calling on the Twitter won the Nobel Peace Prize If
before the activists were defined by their causes, are now defined by the tools they employ. The Warriors enter the Facebook Internet to push for changes. "You sãoa our great hope," said James Glassman, a former senior State Department official, to an audience of cyberactivists in a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, AT & T (Phone Company ; single) Howcast (video site), Google and MTV.
Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, "offer the U.S. a significant competitive advantage towards terrorists. Some time ago I said that "Al Qaeda is dining us in the internet '. It is no longer so. Al Qaeda is still stalled in Web 1.0. The Internet now is interactivity and conversation. "
CRITICAL
claims are strong and intriguing. Who cares who who dines on the Internet? People who are on Facebook are really our greatest hope? As for the so called revolution via Twitter Moldova, Evgeny Morozov, a researcher at Stanford University who has been one of the most persistent critics of digital evangelism, shows that the importance of Twitter is almost nil in Moldova, where there are very few accounts of this service.
And what happened there either seems to have been a revolution, especially because-like manifestations Anna Applebaum suggested in an article in the Washington Post - indeed may have been a encenaçã , organized by the government. (In a country with paranoid vindictiveness Romanian protesters unfurled a banner at the headquarters of the Romanian Parliament.)
In the case of Iran, people who used Twitter to comment on the demonstrations almost every lived in the West. "It's time to clarify the role of Twitter in the events in Iran," wrote Golnaz Esfandiari months ago in the journal Foreign Policy. " "In summary: In Iran, there was no revolution via Twitter.
The cast of prominent bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, who defended the role of social network in Iran, Esfandiari said, did not understand the situation right. "Western journalists who could not-or not even trying to communicate with people in Iran simply went through the list of 'tweets' in English, containing the tag # iranelection," she wrote in February. "Meanwhile, nobody seems to have wondered why people supposedly trying to coordinate the protests in Iran would not be communicating in farce, but in another language."
Part of that bombast is predictable. Innovators tend to solipsism. Every now and then struggle to fit into their new models the most disparate events and experiences. How
wrote historian Robert Darnton, "the wonders of communications technology in this produced a false-consciousness about the past and even the perception that the communication not have the history, or nothing to important to consider before the days of televisãoe the Internet. "
ENTHUSIASM
But there's another factor at play in this disproportionate enthusiasm for social networks. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in U.S. history, seem to have forgotten what is activism.
In the early 60's, Greensboro was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely suppressed with violence. The first four students to sit at the counter reserved for whites were appalled. "If someone had come up behind me and yelled 'bu', I think I would fall down, "one said later.
On the first day, the manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a group of white thugs appeared in the cafeteria and stood behind the protesters menacingly, uttering epithets like "nigger bad hair." A local leader of the Ku Klux Klan appeared. On Saturday, while the tension grew, someone called and gave a false bomb and the shop had to be evacuated.
The dangers were clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another year of pioneering civil rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has enlisted hundreds of unpaid volunteers in the northern U.S., nearly all white, to teach in Freedom Schools, register voters and promote black civil rights in the Deep South.
"Nobody can go alone anywhere, much less by car and at night," were the instructions given to volunteers. A few days after arriving on the Mississippi, three of them, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were abducted and murdered, by the end of that summer, 37 black churches were burned and dozens of homes used as shelters were attacked with bombs; volunteers were beaten, shot at and chased by trucks full of armed men. A quarter of program participants dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo-and-attack deep-rooted problems is not to soft-ass.
COMMITMENT
What leads a person to this type of activism? Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, compared the deserters from the Freedom Summer program with those who chose to stay, and found that the crucial difference, contrary to what one might expect, was not ideological fervor. "All subscribers-both those who stayed and those who withdrew, were highly committed to the cause and were supporters of the articulated goals and values of the program," he concluded.
The decisive factor was the degree of personal connection between the person and the civil rights movement. Were asked all volunteers to provide a list of personal contacts, people who wanted to keep track of their activities-and thus the likelihood of having friends who were also going to Mississippi was much higher among those who stayed than among those leaving the program. The high-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a phenomenon of "strong ties".
The pattern is repeated in most cases. A study on the Brigate Rosse [Red Brigades], the terrorist group Italian 70 found that 70% of his recruits had at least one good friend in the organization. The same applies to men who joined the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even events that seem revolutionary spontaneous, as those that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany, are at its core, the phenomena of strong ties.
The East German opposition movement consisted of hundreds of groups, each consisting of about a dozen members. Each group had limited contact with the others: at the time, only 13% of East Germans had a telephone. All we knew was that, on the night of Monday, before the church of St. Nicholas, the center of Leipzig, people gathered to express their anger against the state. And the primary determinant those who attended were the "critical friends"-the more friends a person critical of the regime had, the more likely to join the protest.
LINKS
Therefore, a crucial fact about the four freshmen who were segregated into the cafeteria of Greensboro-David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil were links-mu who kept thy. McNeil shared a room with Blair in the housing A & T. Upstairs, Richmond shared the room with McCain, and Blair, Richmond and McCain were students at Dudley High School.
The four took beer on the sly for housing and talked through the night, Blair's room and McNeil. Had in mind the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in the same year and the confrontation in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.
was McNeil who came up with the idea of the protest at Woolworth's. Discussed the issue for nearly a month. One day, McNeil entered the room and asked his friends whether they were ready.
There was a pause, McCain said, in a way that only works with friends who spent long nights talking, "You truce or we go forward? ". Ezell Blair took courage to ask for the coffee, the next day because it was accompanied by her roommate and two best friends since high school.
WEAK LINKS
activism associated with social networks has nothing in common with it. The platforms of these networks are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way to follow (or be followed by) people who may have never met face to face. Facebook is a tool to manage your list of acquaintances, to contact people from whom you otherwise would have little news. That's why you can have a thousand "friends" on Facebook, something impossible in real life.
In many ways, this is wonderful. There is strength in weak ties, as noted by the sociologist Mark Granovetter. Our known-and not our friends-sãoa our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet allows us to exploit the power of these forms of distant connection with marvelous efficiency.
is sensational for the diffusion of innovations, interdisciplinary collaboration, to integrate buyers and sellers and for the logistics functions of female conquests. Weak links but rarely lead to high-risk activism.
VIRTUES
In a book called "The Dragonfly Effect - Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change" [The Dragonfly Effect - Quick Ways, Effective and Powerful Use Social Networks to Promote Social Change, ed. Jossey-Bass], the business consultant Andy Smith and Jennifer Aaker, a professor in the school of business Stanford admininistração tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young entrepreneur from Silicon Valley who one day found to be suffering from acute leukemia mielálgica. The case serves as a perfect illustration of the virtues of social networks.
Bhatia needed a bone marrow transplant, but found no donor among his relatives and friends. The chances would be greater if the donor had their ethnicity, and there were few donors South Asia in the database of American bone marrow.
Therefore, Bhatia's partner sent an email in which he explained the problem of friend to more than 400 of his acquaintances, who in turn forwarded to your contacts, Facebook pages and videos YouTube campaign were created for the Help Sameer. Finally, almost 25 000 new donors enrolled in the database and found an Bhatia compatible with it.
But as the campaign got the accession of so many? Why not ask for anything more participants. It is the only way to get someone you do not really know anything for their benefit. Can you get thousands of people signing up as donors because they do it is incredibly easy. Just send a simple sample of genetic material-in the highly unlikely event that the donor's bone marrow is compatible with someone who needs it, spend a few hours in hospital.
Donating bone marrow is not trivial. But it does not involve financial risk or personal does not mean spending a summer whole being chased by trucks full of armed men. It requires confronting entrenched social norms and practices. Actually, it's the kind of engagement that brings praise and social recognition.
DISTINCTION
evangelists of social networks do not understand this distinction, seem to believe that a Facebook friend and a real friend sãoa same thing, and sign up for a list of donors in Silicon Valley today is activism in the sense that asking for a coffee in a segregated restaurant Greensboro in 1960.
"Social networks are especially effective in enhancing motivation," they wrote Aaker and Smith. Not true. Social networks are effective to increase participation, but reducing the level of participation requires motivation.
's page on Facebook Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, whose average donation is nine cents per capita. The second largest provider of assistance to Darfur on Facebook has 22,073 members and their donations per capita are 35 cents. The Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who donated an average of 15 cents.
A spokesman for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek that "does not necessarily evaluate the value of one for the motion based on the amounts donated. This is a powerful mechanism to promote the involvement of a critical population.
They inform the community, attend events, do volunteer work. It's not something that can be measured by numbers. "
In other words, the activism on Facebook makes sure not to motivate people to make sacrifices real, but to motivate them to do what one does when one is not motivated enough for a real sacrifice. We are far from the lunch counter in Greensboro.
MILITARY CAMPAIGN
Students who participated in protests in the southern U.S. in early 1960 described the move as a "fever". But the civil rights movement had more than military campaign that contagion.
In the late 50's, 16 similar protests had been organized in several southern cities, 15 of which formally coordinated by civil rights organizations like the NAACP [English acronym of the National Association for Population Progressive Color] and CORE [acronym in English for Congress of Racial Equality]. Possible locations for protests have been mapped. Were traced plans. Activists of the movement promoted the training sessions and retreats with potential participants. The four
Greensboro emerged as the basic product of this work: they were members of the NAACP Youth Council. Had strong links with the director of the local chapter of the organization. They were briefed on the previous wave of protests in Durham and attended a series of meetings in churches of movement activists.
When the protests have spread across the south from Greensboro, the spread did not occur randomly. Protests emerged in cities that had the motion-cell nuclei of activists dedicated, trained, ready to convert the "fever" in action.
HIGH RISK
The civil rights movement activism was high risk. He was also, and this is important, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment, fitted with precisãoe discipline. The NAACP was a centralized organization, with command in New York, according to highly formalized operating procedures.
In Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) exercised unquestioned authority. The black church had a central position in the movement and, as pointed out by Aldon Morris in his The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, "a splendid study published in 1984, maintained a carefully demarcated division of tasks, with various standing committees and groups disciplined.
"Each group had a defined mission, and coordinated their activities through structures of authority," writes Morris. "The individuals were responsible for tasks they were designated and major conflicts were resolved by the pastor, who generally held the final authority over the congregation. "
HIERARCHY
This is the second crucial distinction between activism Traditional and its variant Online: social networks do not lend themselves to this kind of hierarchical organization.
Facebook and similar sites are tools for building networks and in terms of structure and character, sãoo opposite of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, the networks are not controlled by a central authority and unique. Decisions are taken by consensus, and the bonds that tie people to the group are weak.
This structure makes the network immensely flexible and adaptable to situations of low risk. Wikipedia is a perfect example. No one installed editor in New York that target and correct each entry. The production effort of each entry is self-organized. If all Wikipedia entries are erased tomorrow, the content will be quickly restored, because this is what happens when a network of thousands of people devote time to a task spontaneously.
There is, however, many networks do not do things right. Automakers, sensibly, use a network structure for organizing your hundreds of vendors, but not to design cars. Nobody would believe that the articulation of a coherent philosophy of design would work better as an organizational system scattered and without leadership.
Lacking a centralized liderançae of clear lines of authority, the networks are real difficulties to reach consensus and set goals. They can not think strategically, they are chronically prone to conflicts and errors. How to make hard choices about tactics, strategies or philosophical orientation when everyone has the same power?
PROBLEMS
The Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (PLO) emerged as a network, and tested recently in the journal International Security, "experts in international relations Eilstrup Mette-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue that this is the reason why the organization ; will have encountered many problems while growing up: "Traces structural characteristics of networks-the absence of central authority, autonomy unrestricted of rival groups and failure to arbitrate disputes through formal mechanisms, the PLO became excessively vulnerable to manipulation external and internal disputes. "
"In Germany of 70 years," the two continue, "the left-wing terrorists, more united and successful, they tended to be organized hierarchically, with professional management and clear division of tasks. Were geographically concentrated in universities, where they could provide central leadership, confiançae camaraderie through regular meetings, face to face. "
It was rare that they turn over their comrades in police interrogations. Already cash equivalents on the right is organized as decentralized networks and did not keep similar discipline. It was common that these groups were infiltrated, and that its members, when detained by police, surrender his companions easily. Similarly, al Qaeda was more dangerous when they had a unified hierarchy. Now that dissipated in the network, has proved far less effective.
SYSTEMIC CHANGE
The disadvantages of networks matter little when they are not interested in systemic change, if they wish only to frighten, humiliate, or make noise, or where no need to think strategically. But if the goal is to fight a powerful and organized, you need a hierarchy. The boycott of the bus service in Montgomery demanded the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transportation to get to work and back every day. And it lasted a year.
In order to persuade people to remain faithful to the cause, the organizers instructed each local black church to maintain high morale and set up an alternative system of carpool who had 48 operators and 42 breakpoints . Even the Council White Citizens, King said later acknowledged that the system worked carpool with "military precision".
When King went to Birmingham, Ala., for the decisive showdown with the city's police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had a budget of U.S. $ 1 milhãoe a team of 100 full-time employees, already installed in the city and divided into operational cells. The action was divided into stages, which gradually intensified and were mapped in advance. The support was maintained through successive meetings, in rotation among the city's churches.
MORAL LEGITIMACY
Boycotts, protests and clashes nonviolent weapons-preferred civil rights movement-are high-risk strategies.
They leave little room for conflict and error. At a time when a single protester abandons the script and react to a provocation, the moral legitimacy of every protest is compromised. The enthusiastic social networks undoubtedly would have us believe that the role of King in Birmingham would be greatly facilitated if it could use Facebook to communicate with his followers and contented himself with sending tweets from a cell.
But the networks are confusing, think of the pattern of incessant correçãoe review, amendments and debates featuring the Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King had tried a "wiki-boycott" in Montgomery, would have been crushed by the white power structure. And who would use a digital communication tool in a city where 98% of the black community could be reached in church every Sunday?
In Birmingham King needed discipline and strategy, the kind of things that social networks are not able to provide.
POWER OF ORGANIZATION
The bible of the movement of social networks is "Here Comes Everybody", Clay Shirky, professor at the University of New York. He tries to show the organizational power of the internet and begins the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, you forgot your smart-phone, an expensive Sidekick in stock a New York taxi.
The telephone company transferred the phone data lost Ivanna a new device and thus the owner and discovered that Evan Sidekick was in possession of a Queens teenager who was using it to take pictures of herself and her friends. When Evan
sent you an email asking you to return the phone, Sasha replied that he was a "white pussy" did not deserve to have him back. Enraged, he set up a web page with a picture of Sasha and a description of what happened. Forwarded the link to friends, who gave it to other friends. Someone located the page Sasha's boyfriend on MySpace and a link to it was created on the site.
Someone found her address on the web and released a video showing the house when it went from there by car, Evan has posted a video on the site. The story got featured on Digg, a news aggregator site. Evan went on to receive ten emails per minute. Created an online forum for your readers to tell their stories, but the visits were so many who lived down the server. Ivanna
Evan and sought the police but the police report defined the cell as "lost", not "stolen", which meant that in practice, the case was closed.
"By then, millions of readers were following," writes Shirky, "and dozens of vehicles in the mainstream media had mentioned the story." Bowing to pressure, the New York police reclassified the phone as "stolen." Sasha was arrested and her friend Evan got the Sidekick back.
Shirky's argument is that this is the kind of thing that could ever have happened in the era before the Internet-and he's right. Evan would not have been able to find Sasha.
The story of the Sidekick would never have been disclosed. An army of people would not have been formed to join the battle. The police would not have caved to pressure from a person just by something as trivial as a lost cell phone. The case, according to Shirky, illustrates "the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause" in the Internet age.
DANGER
According to Shirky, this model of activism is higher. But in fact, is merely a form of organization that favors the weak-link connections that give us access to information, to the detriment of connections saw ; nculo strong that help us to persevere in the face of danger.
Download our energies of the entities that promote strategic activities and disciplined for those that promote flexibility and adaptability. Makes it easier activists to express themselves, and harder, that expression has any impact.
instruments of social networks are able to make more effective the existing social order. There are natural enemies of the status quo.
If, in your opinion, the world just needs a slight polishing, it should not cause you concern. But if you believe that there are still coffee shops because they are integrated into the world, this trend should bother you.
rotund, Shirky concludes the story of Sidekick lost by asking: "What's Next?"-And, indeed, imagine digital future waves of protesters.
But he has already answered the question. What is coming is the same thing repeatedly. A world made up of networks and weak ties are good for things like help people recover from Wall Street to phones from the hands of teenage girls. Viva la revolución.
Translator's note
1. southern states who joined the U.S. against the north during the Civil War (1861-65).
2. In microblogging service Twitter, the "tags" are terms preceded by the symbol #, used to collect all the messages on the same issue as # illustrious.
Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in U.S. history, seem to have forgotten what is activism
activism that challenges the status quo - deep-rooted problems and attacks, not to soft-ass
evangelists of social networks do not understand this distinction, seem to believe that a Facebook friend and a real friend sãoa same
Even manifestations s revolutionary that seem spontaneous, as those that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany, are at its core, the phenomena of strong ties
Opposite to ; River hierarchies, rules and procedures, networks are not controlled by a central authority. Decisions are taken by consensus, and the bonds that tie people to the group are weak
Lacking a centralized liderançae of clear lines of authority, the networks are real difficulties to reach consensus and set goals
(Removed from the Folha de S. Paulo, 12/12/2010, Illustrious).
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